A switch... for your hard drives

[Steve]

Switches for things like printers and monitors have been available for ages. Flick a switch and the PC is connected to a different device through the same port, or the same device is connected to the port of a different PC. However, have you ever thought about switching hard drives?

Cranking up the computer, everything booted up normally. The switch doesn't operate once the system is running, so there's no danger of things getting accidentally switched during operation. After shutting down the computer and selecting the next IDE channel, everything booted up just like I had literately swapped drives.

[Tech-Mods]

A funky device, useful if you want a hard drive all to yourself, but share a PC. However, somebody could just flick the switch and fluff up your hard drive for you... damn them.

[davidstone28]

Useful for different OS installations too.

[TheAnimus]

enless i'm missing something i could make one of these for a 10th of their cost.

Heck i could probably design one for the cost of one.

There not switchign the IDE just the power, because an un-powered HDD on the IDE chain isn't ment to do things that coudl course problems. IIRC.

[fathazza]

man is that overpriced....

and not a new idea either, it's been around in the world of xbox modding for ages and probs before that too...

[Workaholic]

1) I quote "quality is awesome", I wanna complain about that. In effect all you really need is a simply switch that supports 40 inputs and outputs so instead of the large knob, perhaps a push button and the LEDs light up in sequence to select, similar to a PS1 memory card.

2) The inside of a case would get extremely messy.

[Funkstar]

ah, ok, i get it now. The drive bay unit only switched power, but it is power to the interface boards you install between their 4 header cable and your drives. This then seperates the drives from the motherboard controller, as there are some system that don't like having a drive there that isn't powered on. Also i'm presuming that all 4 drives would be set to master so could cause big problems.

pretty clever actually. and i think these boards would jack up the price quite abit:

[Paul Adams]

Wow that's an expensive item for a strange niche to fill - I would have assumed anyone with multiple OS's across multiple disks in 1 rig would be able to enable or disable them at will via the BIOS rather than rely on something like this...

That's how I was switching between 3 systems in the 1 rig, and gave the benefit of being able to toggle between them with a reboot.
None of my disks have been set explicitly to master for years, CS works fine on all of them and saves hassle.

[TheAnimus]

hot swap SCA HDDs.

Ebay has loads of good seagate 15k rpm drives on it, varying size, but 36gig is normally enough for an OS drive.

Then just get some caddies.

[weebroonieuk]

hot swap SCA HDDs.

Ebay has loads of good seagate 15k rpm drives on it, varying size, but 36gig is normally enough for an OS drive.

Then just get some caddies.

and the cables and dont forget the controller card !

[TheAnimus]

pfft every decent motherboard comes with those, enless you want a ZCR addon!

[weebroonieuk]

every decent motherboard in the server class you mean ?

[TheAnimus]

If you've got $200 for an HDD switch, then you can buy a reliable motherboard.

Most motherboards that are no compramise tend to be with scsi onboard (or aviable with).

Many people don't belive how slow my CPUs are when they use my box, a RAID5 of 5 15k rpm drives, with 48meg cache on the raid controller. It flys (but a bit too much sound ) Sure you don't get uber FPS but you never have to wait for things to open.

[weebroonieuk]

what boards do you mean no compromise ? i would have thought that was boards that let u overclock your cpu silly not boards that are considered no compromise because of the cost of them which alot of decent server boards are especially when you factor in the additional cost of onboard scsi controllers

me ... i prefer a very fast cpu as most encoding compression stuff like that is cpu bound and it wont matter how much throughput your array has if your cpu cant keep up with them

anyways i will be building a box with gigabyte ram disks raided and filled with 2gb dimms eventually and that will be more than enough for my os drive and will smoke any other mechanichal disk

[TheAnimus]

DFI over clock so very well.

But are horrifically un-reliable.

SuperMicro will talk to you at length if you've got problems like your system hanging at randomish intervals. Thats the difference.

[weebroonieuk]

but this is an enthusiast orientated site with the majority of people on enthusiast boards

enthusiasts dont need 100% stability like a mission critical server or a webserver for a company or database server

we just want to play with our hardware not worship its granite like stability

and besides server boards and scsi drives are way more expensive than most of us are prepared to pay for a computer

if you want utmost stability and dont mind paying the daft premiums for for a server board in the home then go ahead

my trusty old nf7s and athlon xp are still churning away in the main pc which does the routing so is on 24/7 has been on and overclocked at 2.6ghz for .....well i dont know i cant remember the last time i restarted it

thats stable enough for me !

[TheAnimus]

hey its just my opion that every decent board is well supported, and rock solid.

Thus a server board.

My main rig is using an X6DA8-G2, for some 18 months now. The support i get on the tinyest issue is phenominal. Granted i didn't have to pay the £350 the board cost, but its sure is worth it.

this is way off topic thou, but are you really going to fault my orinigal claim that for hte price of this cheap looking bit of kit, hop swap bays would be better?