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Aluminum pull out trays for $5.99
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anyone get theirs yet? I'm curious if this is actually the Kingwin unit, as the pictures dont look similar enough to me. They look like generic ones. And I want to know if the IDE connector is simply a passthru ide cable, or does it connect to some circuit and transfers the data thru a chip/circuit before writing onto the HD (would mean one more thing that can corrupt data when something goes wrong)
PolarNorth
Member
Cool, ordered 10 of them. Sort of laughed when I realized they are down the street from me. I'll follow up soon Bobalude.
I have had mine for about a month now. I bought them last month on one of thier on day sales. The fan is quiet to me. I have one drive loaded for the family and one for my use. That stops me from having to reload my OS when the kids screw up and click download on everything! I am going to start learning Linux and I want to swap out for that reason too.
They don't look cheap compared to the plastic ones I bought last year at frys. The old ones were loose when pushed in and had hard drive errors on startup so i took them back to frys. You all know how much of a pain that is!
these have not created and hard drive problems that i know of
They don't look cheap compared to the plastic ones I bought last year at frys. The old ones were loose when pushed in and had hard drive errors on startup so i took them back to frys. You all know how much of a pain that is!
these have not created and hard drive problems that i know of
Got mine, solidly built, the top cover is just a slide off aluminum panel, so if you are worried about heat should be able to run it without the top cover (and just leave an empty 5.25 bay in between to get circulation). The fan looks reasonable, but the location is bad, in the back corner, really doubt any air is going to be blown at the enclosed HDD.
This way I can run a games HDD, and a media HDD without having to load all the junk onto my main HDD.
This way I can run a games HDD, and a media HDD without having to load all the junk onto my main HDD.
My advice to you would be to just dual boot. You'll probably be much happier hitting an arrow key to change operating systems rather than switching these out.
You could think up lots of uses for these though. You could have a bunch of different drives with movies or music, or whatever on them. It kinda makes the amount of ide drives you can have limitless. I used these alot while I was going to school. I switched drives depending on what I was practicing. I could make a computer anything I needed like a server, or a linux computer with a simple switch of trays.
tgillespie
Member
For some reason mine has taken over a week to get to me from CA. Im in CO.
One of the major reasons I got it was for the pathetic fan, but it sounds like I might run into heating problems even with it? Its going with a 300GB Maxtor IDE in a in a Dell SC420 box with poor circulation. Take off the top panel I take it?
One of the major reasons I got it was for the pathetic fan, but it sounds like I might run into heating problems even with it? Its going with a 300GB Maxtor IDE in a in a Dell SC420 box with poor circulation. Take off the top panel I take it?
funnyfenix
Senior member
then I guess it was ur first time using tray 🙂 most pull out trays are like that
It's a safety issue - you don't want to accidently have the tray slide out enough to disconnect while the drive is writing. Trust me, you never want this to happen. It sort of corrupts your drive, and if you're unlucky, corrupts it completely. I spent a good 24 hours trying to recover just 1 1MB file off such a corrupted drive, I retrieved only about 65% of it. It really sucked. (No, I didn't pull the tray out, but a new cable was bad, and the connection was flaky enough that even on a read, soemthing really really bad happened to that drive - might have had a swap file on that drive as well - don't recall now.. trying to forget actually)
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
AFAIK, the native IDE port-driver in Windows' OSes doesn't really support hot-swapping at all. I know that Promise used to ship a package for hot-swappable IDE HDs, that included a pair of nice solid metal racks/trays (may have been Kingwin units, don't recall), and their FastTrack IDE RAID controller card, with special drivers. Even if you do use 3rd-party IDE drivers that support hot-swapping IDE HDs, there may still be physical/electrical limitations in terms of the wiring using for the IDE bus in connection with the chipset on your mobo/controller-card. In short, IDE really, really wasn't meant to be hot-swappable. For most systems/setups it's both unnecessary and fairly futile to attempt it (along with risking your data along the way). If you really need hot-swap, I would stick to the newer SATA instead, they have specific provisions for hot-swap.
The price for these is really nice, how is the construction and the fan, in terms of cooling and noise-level? Any issues with UDMA re-tries/CRC errors at ATA-100 speeds?
These things would be pretty darn sweet to compliment a Full-tower Chieftec 'Dragon' case - you could put 12 HDs in it total! I'm thinking of putting two opticals and ten HDs in mine, eventually, using two PCI IDE controller cards and the mobo IDE ports for the opticals and boot HDs, and the rest for RAID. (When I get the money to buy 2TB worth of HDs, that is... 🙂 )
Edit: Just thinking about the power-supply implications of having ten HDs, and wondering if a "520W" PSU will be enough for initial start-up. Potentially, one could use the keylock/power-on mechanism of these mobile racks to manually stagger drive startup during boot, by manually turning each tray's key during post, after the case-internal HDs had finished their spinup phase. A bit of a PITA, but a definate possibility.
looks like a good deal. Now all I need is a place to find some cheap 5-10 gig hard drives. I want to install several different linux distros to try them out and see what I like. Red hat has been the only thing I've used, and I'd like to expand my linux experience. Anything over 10 gig is over kill since I'm just using them for testing.
So based on the last post, there is no way to make a hot swap data drive? I really wanted to be able to have one with the operating system and use another to swap the data drive that was needed at the time. I guess that I will have to power cycle each time? Or can I just restart?
Evadman
Administrator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
It is possible, but is dependant on the controler to be hot swappable. As was stated, ATA is not made to be hot swapable. I certainly would not want to swap these drives even if the controler was hot swapable. How long is a power down/power up set anyway? 2 minutes?
As a side note, I orderd 5 of the cases, got them in, and they are very good build quality. The only marginal thing about them is fan placement. I will probably add 2 40mm fans to the front of the bay for additional cooling. I also ordered 10 more for all my other machines. It will make swapping out failed drives in my array a piece of cake. Toss a spare in and good to go in minutes without disassembing the computer.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
I did a quick Google search for "IDE RAID hotswap capable", and the first page of entries seem to suggest that the HighPoint RocketRAID 100/133/404 all support IDE hot-swap, with the caveat that you must also be using a "hot-swap capable" mobile rack. (HighPoint sells their own branded hot-swap-capable enclosure too, of course). So that's one possibility, as far as controllers go. The next question is, are these racks in question, labeled or indicated in any way as hot-swap capable? AFAIK, that would mean that they can be discreetly powered-down, and that they isolate themselves from the IDE bus at that point as well. Something like that, anyways. Just because the rack has a keylock/power switch, doesn't automatically mean that it supports hot-swapping though.
(It really would be nice, for me, to have a "huge" (160/250GB) sneakernet drive, that I could take between my machines, since I'm not upgrading to gigabit just yet on my boxes. Btw, I recently found some other racks, that use PATA internally, but use SATA to connect the rack to the mobo, which IS natively hot-swappable. I'm sure that they cost a lot more than these do though.
(It really would be nice, for me, to have a "huge" (160/250GB) sneakernet drive, that I could take between my machines, since I'm not upgrading to gigabit just yet on my boxes. Btw, I recently found some other racks, that use PATA internally, but use SATA to connect the rack to the mobo, which IS natively hot-swappable. I'm sure that they cost a lot more than these do though.
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