Hard Drive Drawer / Caddy - what's good?

[Piyono]

What's a popular brand? Lian Li? Kingston?
Are there some standard form factors that allow caddies from different manufacturers to mate or are they all proprietary?

]-[

 

[Mercutio]

They're semi-proprietary. There are at least three different pinout for the bay-caddy connection, and if you use the wrong one, you toast your drive. I speak from experience here.

Find a brand you like and stick with it.

I use Kingwin trays.

 

[Tea]

Lan-Li work OK for me. Plus you can buy just the insert, which saves ... er ... about $1.30.

 

[Bozo]

I've been using the Kingston StorCase carriers/recievers for about 5 years now.
Their newest reciever has a SATA connector on it but will accept carriers for SATA or PATA. Real nice if you have more than one type of hard drive or are planning to move to SATA.


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Piyono]

While we're on the topic...
How, exactly, does hot-swapping work in, say Windows XP?
I don't see any obvious way to unmount a drive from My Computer or a right-click menu...

]-[

 

[Mercutio]

In XP? With an ATA drive? It doesn't.

 

[P5-133XL]

You need a controller with drivers that support hot-swapping like 3ware.

 

[Piyono]

But wasn't hot-swap-ability part of the whole SATA schpeil, what with the ground connectors terminating first and all?

Piyono

 

[blakerwry]

you can unmount a disk in winNT using the disk manager... remove all drive letters and directory access... then isse the command to put the drive in standby/sleep mode.. then disconnect the data and power cables.

You may also want to disable the controller in device manager after putting the drive to sleep.. depends on the controller...

 

[Platform]

What's a popular brand?

If you can get good pricing from someone in the kingdom of the big red maple leaf, I'd go with Antec (ATA, correct?) drive bays and drive modules. These are all-metal, built well, and designed well. I bought several ATA and a few SCSI kits. The ATA kits were about US$32.

However, Antec may not make them any longer. I could not immediately find them on their website.

 

[Santilli]

Granite Digital?
Other options?
SCA?>
s

 

[Bookmage]

got a linky?
Im lookin at replacing the cheapo ones I got from compgeeks last year
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=BS-2231A

They're nice, but the fan is loosely held and rattles which makes an annoying buzz. The heat flow could be much better and the drive screws got stripped real easily. I can't seem to find any information on these cages such as who made it, where to get replacement parts, etc. I''m using two of these with a Promise SX6000 6channel IDE RAID5 card and Port 2 isn't working right. It can't find the drive and I've tried hooking the 6 x WD 200GB SE drives in directly. It seemed to work, but I'm beginning to suspect the card/port may be bad.

I've been lookin at getting 3 drive to 2 bay brackets or drive cage for hot swap or easier access to remove drives. I'm lookin at running my system drives in mirror mode with removable hot swap drive racks, but I'm having a hard time finding some. Anyone got any links to US stores?

I've been using the Kingston StorCase carriers/recievers for about 5 years now.
Their newest reciever has a SATA connector on it but will accept carriers for SATA or PATA. Real nice if you have more than one type of hard drive or are planning to move to SATA.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Santilli]

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg11_idecable&a.htm

 

[Santilli]

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg37_firewireidehotswapbackup.htm#btn_sale_hotswapbackup

 

[Bookmage]

Yeah, I have that looks *exactly* like that but it'd not hot swappable. And It's not supporting any drive >120GB. It's about 2 years old and cost around 20$.
These seeem to be the cheapest I can find. Wish someone did a review of 3-2 bay backplanes. Or 5 - 3 bay versions.

http://servercase.com/miva/miva?/Me...n=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=ATA100/133

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg11_idecable&a.htm

 

[Santilli]

Buy another one. If you got 2 years use, for 20 bucks, you are complaining?

I saw that same model, about 2-3 years ago in a Fremont PC store, and passed on it.

Still, if it works, and it's that cheap...

or, go SATA.

s

 

[Santilli]

Backplanes are really scsi, and that really means supermicro, for SCSI, or, check on their SATA setups.

The ide solutions I've looked at required 4 ide connectors, or, both mobo connectors, with slave and master set. Not really an SCA solution, at all.

Knock on Sata is you have to have a SATA connector to connect to, not a SCSI one, so check with maker on this...
s

 

[Bookmage]

Well that drive rack partially works and isn't ata100 and I can't find a replacement for it. But I wasn't complaining about the one I have. I was noting that the one on Granite Digital looked very similar to the cheapo one I purchased and wanted to make sure it did what it was supposed to. Since the ones I looked were not hot swappable and not worth 55$, I didn't want to find out the ones in the link were the same thing. Basically, I'm looking for some drive caddies for hot swappable system drives and for the storage array.

Some stores label the 3 drive to 2 bay racks as backplanes and others as multi-bay removable racks. They off them for all three formats, IDE, SCSI, and SATA. Toms hardware recently compared several of the SATA versions and noted the differences such as price, construction quality, durability, and fan efficiency. The last thing one wants to do is plop down $100+ to find out the quality is poor or the fan is loud/ineffective, etc.
The IDE backplanes differ based on the brand of hard drive, since they vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

I was curious as to where people purchased their server parts.

 

[Santilli]

I'd call Ken at Granite Digital, and explain your concerns. He's always been more then helpful, and his products have been industry standard, for as long as I can remember.

I noticed the resemblance between an old el cheapo setup I saw in Fremont, and the GD product.

I don't think IDE can be hot swapped, but I could be wrong. All the solutions I've looked at require a reboot, for the OS to see the new drives, except firewire solutions, and USB 2.

s

 

[Santilli]

I might make a road trip out of it. I could call him tomorrow, and see if I could run down. I've got a scsi cable I would like to use, and everything is 1 80 degrees out of position for my use.

s

 

[Bookmage]

If you run an IDE Raid card that supports hot swapping, you can hot swap IDE. It really depends on the raid card and the drive caddies being used.

So anyone else wanna mention what type of caddies they use and where they got it from?

 

[Howell]

If you run an IDE Raid card that supports hot swapping, you can hot swap IDE. It really depends on the raid card and the drive caddies being used.

So anyone else wanna mention what type of caddies they use and where they got it from?

I use some plastic ones from Inclose (now owned by Sanmax). They have been very good to me but I no longer need them.

I will have 2 recievers and 4 carriers for sale in the middle of July when I get back from vacation.

 

[NRG = mc²]

I find that using external USB2/Firewire enclosures with a regular 3.5" drive is a more reliable option and costs the same. Plus, if you swap from machine to machine you dont need to buy an extra receptacle thing, whatever its called.

Only downside is if a machine doesn't support USB2 in which case transfers are hideously slow.

 

[Bookmage]

However, running an array with 6-8 hard drives makes having half a dozen individual external enclosures kind of pointless. For one or two drives, sure an external USB2/Firewire is great. But for a storage server running RAID5 on some overpriced RAID5 card, external is not a solution. Hotswap is really nice and having removable caddies is even nicer. Besides, it looks really cool to have a bunch of handles on the front of ur server ;P

 

[mubs]

I'm thinking of buying a whole ton (2 racks, 7 carriers) of the Kingwin KF-21 family. Any comments, or reasons I shouldn't?

Thanks.

 

[i]

I'm thinking of buying a whole ton (2 racks, 7 carriers) of the Kingwin KF-21 family.

That's a lot of porn. :mrgrn:

Any comments, or reasons I shouldn't?

Yes. Go whole-hog. Pick up a few of these instead.

 

[mubs]

Well, i, the top cover for product in the link you provided is "screw" less, so I'm ruling it out :lol:

No bud, I'm not into pr0n. I want to try various OSes (my recent thread in Tech Support ). It'd be a lot easier to swap drives in and out. I have two systems I hardly use and a few smallish HDDs put away. The OSes needing a beefier system will be tried on my spare duallie, and the leaner/meaner ones (BSD flavors) will go on the trusty old BH6 running a Cel-300A.

Make sense?

 

[myself]

I have it on good authority that i is currently biting his tongue in an effort to refrain from responding with any double-entendres, lame puns, wise-cracks, or smart-ass comments. :wink:

That said, yes, it sounds like a very convenient route to take. Being short on cash, I would have tried to install as many different OSes on a single disk with lots and lots of partitions. But even with something like XOSL, that would quickly become a real pain in the neck. Having separate disks for each OS sounds like a worthwhile luxury.

 

[Platform]

,,,It'd be a lot easier to swap drives in and out. I have two systems I hardly use and a few smallish HDDs put away....

Make sense?

Yes, indeed, it makes a LOT of sense.

For several years, I've advocated the use of plug-able drive carriers with both data and operating system drives.

Before plug-able drive carriers, I was advocating (at least with SCSI) the use of external drive enclosures to do the same.

There are still many good uses for external drive enclosures, but they are no longer cost effective for using multiple drives in the manner described above.

 

[mubs]

Thanks, myself and Platform.

I multiboot two Windows variants on my main system (have been for ~ 6 years, so I'm not new to the idea). In the past, I've tried multibooting different OSes on my spare machines, and have sometimes had horrendous results. I guess I'll tread a middle path now; buy fewer carriers and also multi-boot, but only multi-boot "compatible" OSes. Some googling is in order.