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RDD / Every kind of member drive / SCSI and Fibre Channel

Cheetah 15K.5 · Atlas 10K V · Fujitsu MAW · ST3300655LC · PowerEdge 2850 · ProLiant DL380 G5

SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. The drives before SAS, in the servers nobody turned off.

Before SAS there was parallel SCSI, and before that there was more parallel SCSI: 68-pin Ultra160 and Ultra320 drives, 80-pin SCA drives that slid into hot-swap backplanes, and 40-pin Fibre Channel drives from the SANs that ran on loops. Seagate's Cheetah and Barracuda ES, Maxtor's Atlas, Fujitsu's MAW and MAX, IBM's and Hitachi's Ultrastar. They live on in PowerEdge 2850s and 2950s, ProLiant G4s and G5s, IBM xSeries and the occasional EMC Clariion, running a payroll or a practice database that nobody dared migrate, and they arrive here seized, clicking, or dead after a move to a cupboard. They need a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller to be seen and a donor drive from a market that closed a decade ago to be repaired. One drive imaged is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing; a 15K SCSI set of five or more starts at £1,250 + VAT.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild while a second drive is flagged. Do not clear or import a foreign configuration. Do not initialise, reformat or PSID-revert anything. A rebuild reads every sector of every surviving member, and on a set whose drives were bought together it is where the second failure is found. Nothing on the drives gets worse while the server is off.

SCSI and Fibre Channel symptoms, and what each means.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →
Dead after a move to a new buildingBearings seized, or electronics that did not survive the cold. Do not keep trying.Do not delay
ClickingFailed heads, on a drive with no donor market. Power down.Do not delay
Controller sees nothing on the busTermination, cabling, or the drive. Do not swap cards from other machines.Everyday job
Spins, then spins downFirmware or a tired motor. Power down.Do not delay
The RAID card is dead and the drives are fineThe array is on the drives. Image them; the card is not needed.Everyday job
One drive out of a RAID 5 from 2006The set is a set of donorless drives. Send all of them.Do not delay
Packing it and posting it: power the server or shelf down, write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier, and keep it in the carrier. Send every member from the set where the set is the job, or the one failed member where the set is healthy and you want it imaged for the rebuild. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller only if we ask for it. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth rather than the price of the drives, and use a tracked service. The posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

Where it lives, and what fails.

Termination and cablingA parallel SCSI bus needs terminating at both ends and every device set to its own ID; a drive that seems dead on a badly terminated bus is often fine. The bench has the controllers, the adaptors and the terminators, and tries those before the drive.
80-pin SCA and 40-pin FCSCA drives get power and data from one connector on a backplane, and need an adaptor to run on a cable. Fibre Channel drives need an FC host adaptor and, for the loop types, a bypass or a hub. Neither will ever connect to a desktop.
DonorsCheetah 15K.5 heads are not made, and have not been for years. The bench keeps stock and buys what it can; some jobs wait for a match, and the free look says whether yours is one.
The RAID cardPERC 4 and 5, Smart Array 6i and P400, ServeRAID: hardware RAID whose configuration is on the drives as well as the card. A dead card is a set of drives that image and reassemble without it.

Model strings, and what they tell us.

Describe yours to us →
Model string What it is What it means on the bench
ST3300655LCCheetah 15K.5 300GB, 80-pin SCAHot-swap backplane drive; adaptor needed on a cable
ST3146854LWCheetah 15K.4 146GB, 68-pinCable drive; terminate the bus
ST3300007FCCheetah 10K.7 300GB, Fibre Channel40-pin FC-AL; needs an FC adaptor
8K073J0Maxtor Atlas 10K V 73GBDonors nearly gone
MAW3073NCFujitsu MAW 73GB 10K SCACommon in Fujitsu-Siemens Primergy

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →
01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no resets
02

The drive on its own bench

A parallel SCSI or Fibre Channel drive goes onto a controller of its own generation, terminated and addressed correctly, with the adaptor its connector needs. A drive that will not spin is examined for seized bearings before the motor is asked again; a clicking one waits for a matched donor.

Read at its native interfaceFailing heads to the clean bench
03

Imaged once, at its native sector size

Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.

Head by head, weak areas lastNative sector size preserved
04

The image, and the set

Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.

One member: a sector-identical image on fresh mediaA set: reassembled in software from the images
05

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–4 days at the bench

What arrives most often

  • Do not keep trying it. A drive from 2006 that did not spin this morning is a drive whose bearings or heads need the bench, and every attempt is a spin-up it cannot afford.
  • Do not borrow a SCSI card from another old machine. Wrong termination and a wrong ID can damage a drive that was only waiting for the right controller.
  • Send the set, not the drive. A RAID 5 from 2006 with one drive gone is a set of drives without donors; the survivors are imaged while they still read.
  • Say what is on it. A 2006 payroll database is a job of a few gigabytes; the copy-out is planned around it.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RDD-2026-0549JOB LOGGED ✓

Three Cheetah 15K.5 SCA drives from a PowerEdge 2850 whose PERC 4 had died, holding a practice's twenty years of patient records

The card was dead and one drive would not spin; the other two were fine. The seized drive had its bearings freed and its heads checked on the clean bench and was imaged on a terminated Ultra320 controller with an SCA adaptor; the other two were imaged directly. The RAID 5 was reassembled from the three images and the database copied out onto a new drive the practice's new server could read.

100% of it recovered9 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Power down and stop trying
  • Label the slots and send every drive from the set
  • Send the RAID card too, if it is easy
  • Tell us what generation the server is and what is on it

What sets us back

  • Powering it on again to see
  • Borrowing a SCSI card from another machine
  • Letting a new server's controller initialise the drives
  • Throwing the old server away before the data is off

Questions answered before you commit.

Can you still read SCSI drives?

Yes. Ultra160, Ultra320, 68-pin, 80-pin SCA and 40-pin Fibre Channel, on controllers of their own generation with the terminators and adaptors they need.

Can you repair a Cheetah 15K.5?

When a donor can be found. The bench keeps stock, and the free look says whether yours is a job that waits for one.

The RAID card is dead. Are the drives readable?

Yes. The array's description is on the drives; they are imaged and the set reassembled in software without the card.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; a 15K SCSI set of five or more from £1,250 + VAT.

How long does it take?

3–4 days at the bench for one drive that needs no donor; longer where one must be found, and the figure says which.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

Seagate Cheetah and Savvio →Dell PowerEdge and PERC →HPE ProLiant and Smart Array →SAS drive not detected →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

0800 6890668

Price my jobPacking and posting