ide hotswap

[jungle]

anybody using hotswapable ide drives? I am debating about backing up a pair of servers to harddrives in removable caddies? Is the promise fasttrak 100 tx2 a good choice? Ideally i want to do this on a win2k machine, run the os and normal server tasks on the primary ide channel, and have the fasttrak be the controller for the back up drives. so i back up the one server to one of the backup drives, swap the back up drive and backup the other server; and not have to down it every time i swap the drive being used for backing up.

 

[Gunbuster]

I dont think IDE can do hot swap, external firewire or USB2.0 may be your best bet

 

[Workin']

Some removable racks (in conjunction with a small software utility) will let you hot-swap IDE drives that are not your boot device. Don't know how that would work with the Fasttrak, that's a RAID controller and it might get irritated if you remove a drive from the array while it is turned on.

There might be some more expensive solution out there, but I don't know about it.

 

[jungle]

i just got a couple of emails back from promise. Swapping on the fly is doable with the FastTrak 100 TX2 Pro, (no rebooting, hence the term hot swapping, dah!). anywho, they claim that it NEEDS to be in an array configuration because it needs to have redundancy. This confuses me because, if the drives on the fasttrak are just holding files who cares? the os is on a totally different controller.

 

[jungle]

does anybody see why i can't do hotswapping w/ the promise card in a NON-raid configuration?

 

[jungle]

still lookin' for answers...and as long as we are here, can any one see a real advantage for going to dat vs hard drive backups? because by the time you figure in for an lvd controller, the drive, and media, one can get a 5 pack of 100gb ide drives, a couple of drive caddies, and the ide raid raid card.