removeable hard drive racks

[amdskip]

I'm gonna make my duron 750 into a sort of a server and I want it to have removeable hard drive racks. I was looking at newegg and they have some very nice ones.

My question is how do they make hard drives hot plugable? I know servers have this ability I believe and I was just wondering how they do this. I'm also thinking about messing with scsi as I have never really played with it and raid is also a good possibility more for backup purposes rather than speed.

comments are appreciated

 

[VBboy]

What exactly is your question? SCSI standard supports hot-swapping, while IDE does not. IDE hard drive racks are NOT hot-swappable. They exist for convenience of being able to remove/replace the hard drive when the PC is off. You can get some $15 IDE racks...

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: VBboy
What exactly is your question? SCSI standard supports hot-swapping, while IDE does not. IDE hard drive racks are NOT hot-swappable. They exist for convenience of being able to remove/replace the hard drive when the PC is off. You can get some $15 IDE racks...

That's not entirely true. There are some IDE racks that are hot-swappable, if you look on Newegg you'll find a few. However, you would need to have them connected to an IDE RAID card which also supports hot-swapping.

 

[buleyb]

Agreed with VetteGuy,
you can get raid/ide controllers that support hotswap of IDE, but not necessarily possible. If you're just 'looking' into raid, keep in mind that you can't just pull these drives out at will, especially with RAID 0 (or if no RAID used, you can't pull your primary drive).


You could look into SerialATA (Promise, 3Ware), it supports hotswapping if i'm correct, but you'd still need some removeable bays (Antec sells some, nothing special though).

SCSI will work, but you'll pay more just for 'messing with scsi'.

More input needed to offer more advice

 

[amdskip]

Thats what I needed to know, thanks!

 

[buleyb]

One more word of advice...when you find a removable HD rack, look for something that is metal. A lot of them have metal brackets to connect to the case, but use a plastic case to hold the actual hard drive. You'll want to keep temps down, so aim for something more thermally conductive (like aluminum construction). Good luck