External Hard Drive Chassis

[chukdotcom]

I have a bunch of hard drives that I would like to mount outside of my computer. Do they make a device (IDE, SCSI, Firewire, USB) that I can put a bunch of hard drives into, and then hook that device up to a PC in order to use the hard drives? If not, whats the closest thing to what I want to do?

 

[ojai00]

Newegg Hard drive Mobile Rack Kits

Could that help? There are external hard drive enclosures that you can try also.

Hard drive kit

Hope this helps.

 

[corkyg]

Mobile racks are one option. They are connected internally via your regular IDE ribbons.

There are also external cases which are truly external for SCSI, Firewire or USB connection. I saw some today on the shelf at CompUSA.

A mobile rack is a two-piece affair . . . the rack itself is mounted in a 5.25" drive bay and connected by IDE cable or SCSI cable to the appropriate controller. The drive is mounted in an inner tray which slides in/out and locks to make electrical contact. This lets you swap inner trays in a connected rack and makes for easy backup of the whole system as well as booting to different HDDs and OS's without having to set up multi-boot nonsense.

True external HDDs can be bought ready made . . . but the case housings let one use one's own surplus drives. The best link today is Firewire . . . tomorrow it might be USB 2.0 if the drivers ever get sorted out.