[GLLUG] Hot Swap an ATA Hard Drive -Another Approach

[Matt Graham]

On Wednesday 19 February 2003 15:27, after a long battle with 
technology, Gary Holbrook wrote:
> I've always wanted to try this with vanilla drives and cheap cages:
> Get a 5 1/4 inch external USB enclosure and mount one of the
> swappable cages in it.  Then you could use vanilla IDE drives and use
> the usb enclosure to make them hot-swap.

I don't think this'd work the way you want it to.  The "swappable cages" 
you refer to *will* make an IDE drive hot-swappable, so long as you run 
the script Jeff mentioned earlier (on BSD) or the script I mentioned 
earlier (on Linux) when swapping drives.  USB 1 is too slow for disks, 
while USB 2 is better, it's still slower than a direct IDE connection.  
You'll still have to rescan the SCSI bus using a script if you change 
the drive without unplugging the USB device.  Not to mention that the 
IDE hot-swap cages you refer to may be too big (many are meant to fit 
in a 5.25" bay) to fit into the external USB disk enclosures (meant to 
take 3.5" disks), and weird hardware interactions between the IDE 
hotswap cage and the USB disk enclosure could take place.



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