Hmmm. Maybe a better alternative is to install firewire. Is it possible to take a spare old IDE drive and buy some kind of firewire adapter for it? How much would this cost?
In the meantime, I got this informative response from the Tech Support of the removable HD drawer.
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Hot Swapping IDE Disk Drawers on Windows 2000
IDE Disk Drawers can be hot swapped under Windows 2000 to provide the ability for non-system drives to:
- Exchange drives between machines.
- Perform backup and restore operations.
- Maintain offline file storage.
The disk drawers may also be used to cold swap the system drive.
In general, the procedure involves dynamically linking and unlinking devices to disks. Volumes on a disk will retain their attributes such as volume-id and drive-id across mounts. All operations can be performed from Computer Management, which can be found in Administrative Tools under Control Panel.
To Dismount a Drive:
1. Stop running any processes, such as SQLServer.
2. Open Computer Management and click on Device Manager.
3. Expand Disk Drives and Disable the removable drive (select the correct drive).
4. Click on Disk Management.
5. Check that the drive has a status of Failed.
6. Wait for the drive to settle.
7. Turn the drawer key to unlock and slide the drive out of the bay.
To Mount a Drive:
1. Slide the drive in the bay and lock with the drawer key.
2. Open Computer Management and click on Device Manager.
3. Enable the removable drive via the Properties menu (may crash 1st time tried).
4. Click on Disk Management.
5. Right click to Reactivate Disk.
6. If needed, right click on volume to Reactivate Volume.
7. If needed, right click on volume to change Drive Letter.
8. To check, click on Rescan under the Action menu.
9. Restart stopped processes such as SQLServer.
Notes:
* Windows 2000 differentiates each physical disk by writing a signature on the disk.
* Define each removable disk as Dynamic and not Basic.
* Assign a different Volume-id to each physical disk. Start a scheme.
* Label the outside of each disk drawer with the Volume-id as well.
* For a group of swappable drives, be sure that all physical disks are of the same manufacture, model, size, etc, otherwise the BIOS would need to be changed when swapping.
* Install the removable disks and drive bays as slave-devices off a permanent master-device such as a CD-ROM or the system drive.
* When mounting a drive, there have been cases of the system crashing. This looks like a bug in Windows 2000.
Ian Davis
Tech Support
StarTech.com
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