On Sat, 14 Jul 2001 00:39:15 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 21:37:55 -0500
>From: Ray Williams <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Hard Drive Docking Device
>
>Approximately a year ago I noticed an ad featuring a hard drive docking =
>device that installed
>in the 5" hard drive bay. The other component of the device installed =
>to the hard drive as a sled,
>thereby allowing the HD to be installed- un-installed easily from the =
>front of the case. It seems this=20
>would be a handy method to have more then one operating system,each on =
>it's own HD.
>At the present time I have W98 & WME on separate HDs and using Boot =
>Magic for booting.
>I would like to use WME, W98, WXP, and experiment with Linux, each on =
>separate HDs,using the docking
>method if it is practicable.
>If anyone has used this procedure I would appreciate any feed-back, =
>advice, and where the product
>can be purchased.
>Thanks,
>Ray Williams
I have extensively tested these"mobile racks" over the last 20 months
and now have about 60 deployed. They are NOT all equal. Quite a few
early designs were pretty bad. For IDE drives the better designs use
Centronics type connectors which is a very solid conservative design
choice. This doesn't mean different brand and model mobile racks are
interchangeable!
I tested about 6 different brands and models. I have standardized on
one of the least expensive Lian Li MR-27. These I buy (in person
retail) at a local mid sized walk in computer shop in my area namely
www.pixelusa.com. They cost $13 complete. They also have other models
and a link to the Lian Li website.
Bear in mind that on small and adapter type items its common for shops
or even large stores to mark them up a lot.
Lian Li makes an extensive selection of mobile racks of all types as
well as high quality expensive Aluminum PC cases.
The first MR-27s I bought a year ago were not ATA100 compliant.
Present ones are ATA100 though I run everything at ATA 33.
I should emphasize that II would NOT be comfortable to use this
particular model on hard drives that get very hot.. Notably marginal
in my opinion most all 7200RPM Seagates, some earlier Quantum. and
some Maxtor. For those I'd probably use an Aluminum mobile rack.
Considerably more expensive.
Most of my newer drives are 7200RPM (and a few 5400RPM) 10 to 40GB
from IBM, Fujitsu, very late model Quantum (Fireball AS), Samsung.
These run quiet and cool. I checked this extensively. You can turn the
computer off remove and open the MR easily and feel the drive or take
its temperature..
My MR-27s are the ones with little 1" fans in back to draw air through
the lovers and over the drive. I have seen some unlabeled ones in
plain white boxes that look kind of similar without the fans.
I have 2 mobile racks in each my own three critical systems which run
most of the time in an un air conditioned room and they have never
failed me . Two of those systems also have internal SCSI drives not
in mobile racks. I find its fine to mix SCSI with IDE on a system
I swap the MRs between computers extensively (its necessary to visit
BIOS if the geometry is different) and also use them extensively for
working with various OSes.
It is extremely important to remember to not write to a hard drive
(Neither you nor your OS starting up!) when BIOS is set to a different
geometry!!!!
Subsequently I retrofitted all the computers I am responsible for with
at least one MR-27. It allows me for instance to ghost my clients
drives with my CDR or to work on their problems at my convenience.. If
their drive is in a MR I take it for a day or so. If it is one of
their fixed drives I take an empty 30GB in a MR over and copy it to
that.
So I'm a big believer in mobile racks! . Lian Li ones in particular.
They have worked flawlessly for me.
And it has certainly changed my perception of PC cases. Nowadays I
want more 5.25" drive bays! 4 at least.
I also modified a MR-27 to hold an Iomega Atapi Zip 100 drive. I can
either bring this up as a drive letter or boot from it and then it
becomes A: and the floppy becomes B:
I'm sure there are people out there with bad experiences with some
shoddy or early mobile racks. I've seen some dubious designs. Or who
got caught in the usual problems of setting up large drives and
mingling them with old, And master slave issues which aren't exactly
standard especially with older drives.
Most times I set up MRs on CSel cables. This allows swapping drives
between drawers or computers without opening the MR and renumbering. I
find this very convenient. Its also nifty to be able to reverse drives
and write MBR on a drive that's not going to be primary master,
Some old drives have no CSel jumper setting so in that case they have
to go in a computer where the mobile rack fixed part "sleave" is not
on a Csel cable.
According to the hard drive design engineers around here (Fujitsu and
IBM) CSel (Cable select) is now the new standard. ATA100 cables are
always or usually CSel cables.
Myself I have no drives running at ATA66 or ATA100 and at least till
recently all my clients have TX LX and BX based motherboards. That
means UDMA 33. Considering that the fastest IDE drives can't
physically write data faster than about 42MB sec that is no great
loss. Recently I have a client with a new Athlon build and the MR27s
seem to be fine at ATA100.
A lot of technology improvements like ATA100, AGP4X, PC133 and so
forth aren't really that noticeable except in combination.
So yes! "Drives in drawers" and inexpensive hard drives are a great
way to safely and conveniently experiment with OSes, xfer data and
more!
As for OSen to play with maybe add Win2000Pro and FreeBSD and to your
list lest you miss major goodness.
Mark Paulson
Silicon Valley California.
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