Hi John, I'm glad you found this reference. I was wondering at what point the connector might fail due to normal use and wear. 1000 swaps or 3 years (approx.) is OK for me, but I'll be sure to buy some spares and keep them around for the eventual rack failure.
I love these things. I'm mounting a couple of 120Gig drives in these and mounting the racks in a USB to IDE enclosure to create what is essentially a 120Gig portable device. Forget about zip, cd, dvd - 120Gig allows you to take ANYTHING ANYWHERE. I may look into a Firewire connection instead of USB and see if that boosts the speed - but USB is universal and Firewire still isn't on every machine. Naturally, this wouldn't be an appropriate solution where speed is critical, but it would be nice for say demoing Linux or Hercules without installing anything on a customer machine, and of course for just transporting huge amounts of data to and from the office. Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room�6030 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C.� 20224 Voice: (202)�927-4188�� FAX:� (202) 622-6726 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----Original Message----- From: John Summerfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 4:59 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Coffin Michael C wrote: > AVLogic.com - they're terrific!). By the way, the lockable removable > racks with power/IDE activity lights are only $12 at AVLogic.com and > work great if anyone is interested. A word of caution: >From my reading, the cheaper devices (Centronics-style connector) are good for about 1000 swaps - either side. Say, three years, maybe a little less, with daily swaps. For your use that's fine. There are hot-swap caddies too - see www.vipower.com - but hot-swap is not an ATA standard, and it does not work with Linux. That said, you can still shut the system down but not turn off the power to the whole system in order to swap. Note that a solution involving a second system, both running drdb, can give you hot-swap of the whole server. You could then use _whole_ disk for archives, and swap when you want without taking down the service at all. -- Cheers John. Please, no off-list mail. You will fall foul of my spam treatment. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
