As Erik E. Fair wrote ...
> At 10:50 -0800 3/24/99, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> 
> >Probably not Storageworks canisters. Believe it or not but there are a
> >couple of the newer Alphaservers that use a sort of metal bracket-thingy
> >of their own. I'm suspicious about the SCA-2 connector remark.
> 
> Precisely. It's a small slide-rack arrangement; a mounting bracket goes
> around the drive to align it with the backplane and the SCA-2 connectors
> when you slide it into its slot. The drive sits in this bare, and air is
> sucked in the front of the box, over the drives, and blown out the back.
> There is also a nice set of LEDs under each drive slot which are exposed to
> the front panel of the DS 3305 box to show you the status of the
> drives/slots.

Right. Seen them. You might be looking at long and tedious search. These
things are pretty new and might not have hit the second hand market yet.
And a lot of the Storageworks plastics you find on the net stem from
OEM customers. DEC used to sell empty plastics (white ones, the
branded ones are green or blue, except for the PC business unit disks
who were also white and... <you don't want to know more>) but gave
up pretty quickly when we found out that this gives massive headaches
when people started using every disk type under then sun behind our
raid controllers. With the quality (ugh) of disk firmware out there
is was a support nightmare.

> I'd like to get those brackets by themselves (enough to populate the box),
> but I can't find DEC's part number (I've got drive part numbers, but DEC

Gimme those part#s, I can probably break down the assembly to lower
level part#s. This will most likely buy you zilch though. These part#s
are probably non-salable parts which means you cannot get them through
normal ordering channels. *Maybe* through Compaq MCS but I doubt it.

> wants $2.3K for an 18G drive which is less than $1K on the commodity

Of course. I need to get paid  a handsome salary you know ;-) 
But this also gives you a good reason why you probably cannot get the 
bare brackets.

Groeten / Cheers,
Wilko
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 |   / o / /  _  				Arnhem, The Netherlands
 |/|/ / / /( (_) Bulte 				WWW  : http://www.tcja.nl
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