> The cradles are fine, but I'm not confident about introducing an IDE > drive while the machine is powered up.
Good, and I strongly suggest you keep it that way. ;) Connecting/disconnecting an IDE bus while it's powered up is liable to fry controller, disk, or both. Those cradles have a lock for a reason. SCSI isn't hot-swappable either, but it's possible to make a piece of electronic which in effect cuts off the bus in an electrically safe way. In theory of course this could be made for IDE too, but it probably doesn't exist. If it doesn't explicitly say hot-swappable on the cradle, forget it. That wouldn't be your only problem - I've read that Linux isn't designed for IDE hard disks being suddenly different (i.e. you can't add/remove disks, like you can with SCSI). Your only other choice is USB2 or firewire. USB2's theoretical maxiumum is 525Mbit/s, firewire's 400Mbit/s. A cheap firewire card from tastech easily did the 3Mbyte/s burn speed for 2x dvd burning for me. Whether USB/firewire IDE disk enclosures do useful speeds under Linux I'll count on when I see it. This may well be highly dependent on the particular enclosure (which is where the USB/firewire<->IDE conversion happens). > I could possibly go for a SCSI controller instead of the IDE ... so any > experience of those would be good, too. Linux should support hot-swap of SCSI disks. Electrically this is not a function of the controller, but the disk cradle. Prepare to bleed $$. You're looking for hot-swappable raid enclosures. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
