Toggle switches for hard drives.

[Eric62]

I'm not sure they make such a thing, but I'd like to have some sort of switch I can attach to the exterior of my case (front or back, without drilling holes) that I can use to power on and off a hard drive.
My goal is to have one (or more) hard drives installed that I can use for data storage, but that aren't spinning constantly during the time that they're not being used.
A 3 switch set up that fits in a 3.5 (or 5.25) exterior drive bay would be ideal.
Does such a device exist?
Thanks to all that can help.

 

[Zepper]

Such things existed for PATA drives. With SATA being a much higher frequency, IDK whether such has been done for them. Why not use an eSATA external drive enclosure or a mobile rack?

.bh.

 

[bruceb]

It can be done, but you won't find it off the shelf. Basically, you need some sort
of blank fill panel for the bay size, then you drill it and mount your switches on it.
Then all it takes is some wire to connect in series with the power wire (usually the
red wire) to the 4 pin molex on the hard drive. If I was doing it, I would remove the
pin from the connector shell & use a 1 pin molex male / female to bring it to the
switch and the other wire from the switch to the drive would have a Female Molex
pin on it which then gets inserted into the connector from the power supply to the drive

Not hard to do, but you need a molex removal tool and crimper. You can also just cut,
splice, solder and heatshrink the connections

You can find nice panels here: http://www.mnpctech.com/casemodstore.html

 

[corkyg]

BruceB's suggestion is good. And it is the cheapest solution. I've done that. But, my new computer has a pair of SATA mobile Racks installed so I can swp disks easily without opening the case. Each rack has a key switch.

 

[Eric62]

I'm looking into the SATA mobile rack suggestion. The SATA Backplane might be the ideal solution.
Thanks for your responses.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Why not just have an external hard drive enclosure that you would just attach when you need it?

 

[corkyg]

I think we're talking full SATA or PATA internal transfer rates - capable of running duplicate drives or multiple OS's. Externals are generally snail like by comparison, but probably OK for just data storage.

 

[Eric62]

I have 3 external hard drives. Two in swappable enclosures, and one in a sealed enclosure. Only one has it's own on/off switch.
This is going to sound goofy, but I hate having to get out of my chair to plug the power cords in, then attach the USB cables, then wait for my computer to find the new hardware devices. So it only takes a minute, but that's still enough to annoy me.
The SATA Backplane I'm looking into claims to have it's own on/off switches for each of the 3 SATA drives it can hold.