On Monday 28 March 2005 05:26 pm, Greg Wallace wrote:
I currently have an external hard drive container with a single hard drive capacity. I would like to have the ability to swap out hard-drives on a single device similar to this one except without having to go through all of the effort of screwing the drive down onto the mounts. I'm wondering if anyone manufactures a device that makes it simpler to remove and replace disk drives into the device. In my dreams, it might have some simple thumb screws too attach it to the mount so that all you would have to do is slip it in, connect the USB cable and power to the drive, tighten down the thumb screws, slip the cover over it, and plug it in and use it. I. e., you could change out a hard drive on this device in 5 minutes or less. Anyone out there know if there is such a device?
Genica is one brand that makes cheap hot-swap IDE enclosures. I'm presently using 10 of them in a couple of systems - on a 3Ware Escalade card internally and in some firewire enclosures externally. You don't get hot-swap on most motherboard's IDE controllers, since hotswapping isn't supported, but in external enclosures like USB/ieee1394 and on RAID cards / other cards with support, you can. So, get one of these cages (this is just the lowest price place on froogle.com): http://store.yahoo.com/outletpc/c0177.html They're $10 at that place, I wouldn't pay more than $15. Get 2 if you want 2 drawers, but I just lay my drives in there instead of mounting them with screws. They fit tightly enough, and are really easy to swap out when needed. Then, get any arbitrary external 5.25" drive enclosure. I'm using Firewire, but USB is just as cheap. Again, here's the first thing I found on Froogle: http://www.ocie.com/metacart/product.asp?intProdID=2391505 $15. So, for $25+shipping you have your hot-swap tool-free setup. If you have an external enclosure, you may have to power cycle (or unplug/plug) the thing for your OS to detect the changed drive. --Danny