Trios II by Romtec is Excellent

[corkyg]

I just built a new system, and as is my wont, I intended to equip it with a pair of mobile racks so that I could have switchable drives - one being the clone of the other. That is 100% redundancy. I have been doing that for about 4 years now, and it works well.

But, I decided to try a more sophisticated system, the Trios II multi-drive selector by Romtec. It consists of a contactless controller card that sits in a PCI slot (no electrical contact there.) Then there is a bridge cable with a feeder that goes in between the P/S ATX connector and the mobo, with a long lead that plugs into the Trios card. There are 4 IDE ports on the card. One goes to the primary IDE controller on the mobo. Then there are designated IDE ribbons going to up to 3 IDE drives along with numbered power cables. Then a small desktop controller allows the user to select 1, 2, or 3, or 1+2, or 1+3 combinations.

I installed this system easily in less than 30 minutes, and have found it to work very well - as advertised. Today I used it in the 1+3 mode to clone drive 1 to drive 3 using DriveCopy boot floppies.
Trios

I can honestly recommend Trios II for anyone who wants to boot from up to three different drives.

 

[trenchfoot]

yeh, i got the trios II myself awhile back. i'm also running a kvm switch off the same rig, for troubleshooting other rigs. it's got win98se, win2kpro and winxppro loaded on it so that i can run diagnostics and compare results to the rig i happen to be t-shooting. i had a problem with running three hdd's where hdd 2 and 3 would bog down to a crawl until i swapped out the ps for a 430 tru-power. all's fine and i like'um too. did you have any problems with tweaking the bios to get all three drives recognized?