Guys, I need some help pretty bad. I deal in electronics quite a bit and often get in large amounts of hard drives. These drives all have personal data on them and I'm required to wipe the drive with wipedrive pro. Wipedrive Pro 5 supports up to 12 hard drives being wiped at one time on one machine. Considering I have hundreds of drives I need to maximize the amount of drives I can wipe at once. I have looked into sata controller and other things but I'm not sure if that would allow me to connect 12 drives. If anyone has any thougths on the matter I would greatly appritiate it. Thank you for your time.
Even if you had a SATA controller that could accomodate 12 drives they would have to be SATA drives or you would be buying 12 SATA/IDE converters. You are going to be limited by the interface of the HDD. No easy way around it. If you are dealing with IDE/ATAPI drives you will have to have at least 6 Controller ports, on top of the one you will need for the OS to boot your machine. I don't even KNOW of IDE controllers that can be addressed such that 3 could be put on one PCI bus. I looked at the WipePro site (briefly) and I believe that in formatting 12 drives at one they are talking about networked drives. This would mean you would need 2 or 3 PCs with working OSes that can be networked, each with 4 HDD or (6) 2 drive NAS boxes. I take it that since you are using Wipepro you are prepping these drives for resale.
Yes, I'm buying 12 converters. either sata to ide or the other way around depending on which interface a start with. I will also be needing some fiberchannel and scsi adapters. All these I beleive can be converted off of an IDE cable. so if I get 3 IDE controller cards each that should support 4 drives (2 on each cable) I should be able to connect 12 drives correct? That and a 1000w Power supply (Less will do but I have a 1000 on hand that will do just fine) Then I can use the onboard IDE to connect the CD Drive to boot the software to wipe the drives...Also I have some storage arrays on hand I may be able to use...Each with 12 bays which I would have to convert the fiberchannel to whatever drive I would be working with. Thank you for your response dailun. If you have any further input please let me know. I can use all the help I can get. I guess my next question would be can a Standard PC accept 13 IDE devices connected to it. Would the bois even support that many devices at once. I may be better off running off a workstation or server. Anyways, What do you think?
I'm still not clear on what types of drives you are trying to erase. How does FC play into the mix? If you are formatting FC drives you will probably need a JBOD of some kind and they (15 disk) don't come cheap. I am not suure that the IDE controllers can be addressed such that you can have more than one or two on the PCI bus at any time. You need to check with the IDE controller manufacturer to see if it has settable addresses and how many. If I were you I would set up one PC for each interface or you're going to be doing a lot of board swapping.
