IDE Hot swapable?

  • Thread starter Thread starter George Thompson
  • Start date Start date
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George Thompson

Hi,

I know this is a dumb question and that you really should shut down a system
before swaping out a hard-drive. I am tring to back up my computer onto
several 80GB harddrives. I need to back up 2.5 TB of data. This is a lot
of data, and I would have to swap my backup harddrives often. Is it
possible in any way, to just swap the harddrives without having to shutdown
the system. Windows XP has no problem rcongnizing externeal drives without
shutting down, but I cannot use them becuse they are very expensive (keep in
mind I would have to buy a ton of them). Is it possible to do the same for
the internal IDE drives.

Thanks is advance,

George Thompson
 
Do you want to spend money? There is a few solutions from
APC and so forth with hotswop bays for IDE.

Otherwise you can take the chance of just unplugging them.

2 Problems:

1. Power. Removing power by unplugging it? Won't recommend
becuase you might cause a short. Use an external AT PSU
for the drives to removed.

2. IDE channel. You don't want to damage your controller.
If possible use a PCI HD controller from Promise. They're
cheap enough. But remember, 1st go to Device Manager and
disable the IDE channel you're about to remove.

But still, it's not recommended.

You're running XP. Disable a few things. A reboot
shouldn't take more than 30 seconds.
 
Just a recap...

The external PSU is used to switch the drives off before
unplugging them.

Other option is to buy an external unit as you said, but
remember, you can buy the unit on its own as well. For IDE
drives as well. And they are relatively cheap. Besides,
you only need one.

Now with your next PC you can buy SATA drives. Then you
won't have this problem... ;-)
 
There are several ways you can do this. But you need to decide if you really
want to buy have 30 80 gb drives around?

You can buy a firewire enclosure in which you can put your ide drives!

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg23_firewireidecasekits.htm

You could just swap the drives in and out of the cases!

You may want to look at tape with that much data

This will also work it is a promise controller with 2 hot swap enclosures

http://www.centralcomputer.com/emerchant/itemdetail.asp?item=CONPROFAS06R

Wayne
 
got 60 of them
wayne said:
There are several ways you can do this. But you need to decide if you really
want to buy have 30 80 gb drives around?

You can buy a firewire enclosure in which you can put your ide drives!

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg23_firewireidecasekits.htm

You could just swap the drives in and out of the cases!

You may want to look at tape with that much data

This will also work it is a promise controller with 2 hot swap enclosures

http://www.centralcomputer.com/emerchant/itemdetail.asp?item=CONPROFAS06R

Wayne

(keep
Click to expand...
 
George Thompson said:
Hi,

I know this is a dumb question and that you really should shut down a system
before swaping out a hard-drive. I am tring to back up my computer onto
several 80GB harddrives. I need to back up 2.5 TB of data. This is a lot
of data, and I would have to swap my backup harddrives often. Is it
possible in any way, to just swap the harddrives without having to shutdown
the system. Windows XP has no problem rcongnizing externeal drives without
shutting down, but I cannot use them becuse they are very expensive (keep in
mind I would have to buy a ton of them). Is it possible to do the same for
the internal IDE drives.

Thanks is advance,

George Thompson
Click to expand...
My recommendation would be to buy ONE smaller external hard drive, and make sure
that it uses a standard ide drive inside. Take the case off, and unscrew the
hard drive. Now you can swap them in there, and just unplug the usb or firewire
cable (and external power if needed) without rebooting. That would be far less
risky than trying to hot swap drives.
 
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