Re: OT: Swapping hard drives

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Norman Bauman wrote:

> Back in 2001, Harry Binswager and Otis Port were talking about using a
> system in which they put hard drives into carriers, put an adapter in an
> external bay, and swapped hard drives in and out of the bay to use
> different configurations, operating systems, etc.
>
> I've decided that's the way to go.
>
> What do you call those carriers, and where do you get them?

When you say "external bay," that throws me, as it points to a different animal
altogether. If you're talking about hard drives that slide In / Out of your
computer case, these drive trays are called mobile racks. There are various
mfr.s, Lian-Li being one of the better ones. The built-in interface for these
trays are specific to different drive types, so there are a number of models.
I just bought one that is specifically for faster SCSI hard drives. It would
normally run about $70. (I know, you can buy some hard drives for that amount .
. . ), but I got a nice discount from a vendor at a local computer show. The
IDE racks should be quite a bit cheaper. Do a search with CNET or Nextag or
Dealtime, and you should find resellers and price listings.

> I thought I could buy some 20 GB hard drives cheaply and configure them as
> a RAID backup, but the 20 GB (and even the 10 GB) cost almost as much as
> the 40 GB

RAID is another major level of complexity. You'll have to brush up on the
subject, and you'd need a RAID controller card of some sort, at significant
extra expense. This is apt to be a lot more than the casual computer user
bargained for. Short of a RAID setup, with IDE hard drives you just have a
basic Slave / Master configuration to set, and some driver-letter issues if
you're going to have more than one h/d connected at a time. It is possible to
have a setup where you can clone your h/d onto another, for off-site backup
say, using these plug-in racks and a program like Partition Magic, GHOST, or
Drive Image, all of which I think offer a facility for drive-to-drive copying.
OR, you could have a setup where you run different OSes, changing the
personality of your computer according to which hard drive rack is plugged in
just then.

An *external* set of drive bays is something else again, and more of a
complication than I would care to mess with. Don't forget that if you have
good USB 2.0 support, this opens up the possibility of external hard drives of
various kinds in their own travel housings, which may even be hot-swap
connectable -- or even for flash drives. I've seen some keychain type deals
that apparently hold several Gig capacity.

Jordan