@DavidWJohnston thank you for posting about being able to shuck the drive. None of these listings give a good enough view of the power connectors, so I thought this was impossible. This gives me some more options in my own LTO project.
To anyone knowledgeable, I have a problem.
My main system is running out of PCIe slots and lanes. However, I have another PC with 2x M.2 NVMe slots (one is PCIe 3.0 and the other is PCIe 4.0). Is it possible to either:
a) Run an 8 Gbps FC HBA (PCIe 2.0 8 lane) with only half the lanes? 4 Gbps is still 500 Mbps, which should be more than enough to keep this drive maxed out.
b) Run a 4 Gbps FC HBA and connect this LTO tape drive to it?
The last time I played with fiber channel was in the summer of 2000 when I was buying 8 GB used fiber channel drives for $10/piece... as I recall a 27 GB IDE hard drive was about $300 around the same time. I made my own adapters on perfboard based on a guide someone posted to hardocp. I had a Qlogic 64-bit PCI card which I plugged into a 32-bit slot. The four hard drives sounded like a jet engine when I powered them up. Oh right, it was three drives, I fried the first one by swapping the 12 V and 5 V rail. My genius plan was to run the 50 foot fiber channel cable I bought from the basement of my parents house to my room on the second floor; I'd gotten the idea since my father had helped me run Cat5 all around the house. Unfortunately, I remember the drivers didn't work well in Windows 98/2000... the OS paused every couple seconds. I called QLogic support and remember being told that the card was end-of-life. I didn't give up on this dream for a while. I contacted the original poster and proposed that we go into business filling up old Sun Microsystems Model 411 External SCSI Hard Drive enclosures, putting refurbished drives in - along with the db9(?) connectors, and sell them on ebay. At the time, ebay was full of equipment from companies which had gone out of business during the first dotcom boom and bust. Good memories.
