For sale - I'm helping a colleague switch his system around after finishing scanning his thousands of slides. He's selling all but one of his four film scanners and an older, but very high-end storage system.
Scanning:
3 Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED film scanners in very good condition - $1500 each or best offer - happy to sell one at a time or multiples. These are discontinued and hard to find - far superior to any film scanner still being manufactured (other than the Hasselblad Flextights that are more than 10x the price). Standard USB interface, and, while the Nikon software is long-discontinued and won't run on any modern computer, both VueScan (relatively inexpensive) and SilverFast (expensive) still support these workhorse scanners on current operating systems.
1 Nikon SF-210 multi-slide feeder (included with any purchase of 2 or 3 of the scanners or best offer).
Storage (all best offer - the Fibre Channel gear has significant value IF anybody's set up to use it, but is quite specialized, while the Drobos are easy to use, but slow):
Fibre Channel:
1 Promise Vtrak e610f 16-bay Fibre Channel RAID - contains 16 Seagate Constellation 2 TB enterprise grade drives. If you already have Fibre Channel infrastructure, this is at least as fast as any modern Gigabit Ethernet NAS (even with multiple channels), and much faster than many ( it has two host channels, each at 4 Gb/second, for a theoretical performance that should rival a 10 Gigabit NAS - I've never seen it go that fast, but I have seen it transfer 300 megabytes (2.5 gigabits) per second). Already at maximum drive capacity - drives are easily replaceable should one fail, but Promise never upgraded the firmware to handle larger drives.Relatively large, noisy and rack-mounted (was replaced with a combination of GTech Thunderbolt and Synology NAS storage for noise and capacity). Almost certainly not worth it UNLESS you're already running Fibre Channel - FC is a tricky beast, far less straightforward than Thunderbolt or Ethernet.
1 Qlogic Sanbox 1400 Fibre Channel switch. Add drives or computers to your Fibre Channel SAN. 10 Fibre Channel ports - not sure if this is the version with 2 Gigabit/second or 4 Gigabit/second ports - speed not marked anywhere on the switch, and both versions exist. .
1 Promise SanLink 2 Thunderbolt 2 to Fibre Channel Adapter. External box that connects any Mac with Thunderbolt (may also work on Thunderbolt equipped PCs - never tried it) to Fibre Channel SAN - I believe this supports up to 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel per port (2 ports).
1 Apple xServe RAID Fibre Channel RAID with 14 750 GB drives - worked when removed from service, but realistically probably best used for parts if you are already running xServe RAID systems.
Storage (USB - Drobo).
4 DroboPro units, 2 with 8x 3TB drives, 2 with 8x 2TB drives - all have USB 2.0 (NOT 3.0), FireWire 800 and iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. iSCSI is NOT especially reliable on these older Drobos - it's relatively fast if it works, but there is quite a bit of information online that it doesn't work all that well, which has also been our experience. FireWire 800 works fine IF you have a computer old enough to support it (no guarantees on FireWire to Thunderbolt adapters, which Drobo doesn't officially support). Realistically, these are huge, but VERY SLOW USB 2.0 storage systems, with transfer rates in the range of 15 to 25 megabytes per second (slower than any garden-variety external hard drive or even a fast SD card). Since they're capable of double redundancy (similar to RAID 6, although Drobo uses a proprietary technique), they are relatively secure - they'd make good near line storage, where the speed matters less. All four are fully functional at present.
