[Gllug] Unattended backup solution

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 10:41:05 +0100, Tony
>>> <pthagonal at gmail.com> said:

>>> ide doesn't hotswap.

>> Yes, it does, or can.

pthagonal> Feel free to elaborate, or point me at a faq- I'd be
pthagonal> interested to see this work! Though I'd be very wary
pthagonal> with risking my backups on it until I'd tested it
pthagonal> elsewhere pretty hard.

With the proper equipment it is quite safe. The key is to use a
different cable for each drive, and suitable constructed cage.

They don't even cost that much -- look a the 3ware host adapter
and their cage with three hot swap slots.

  http://WWW.3ware.com/products/ata.asp
  http://WWW.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp

There are other ways to ''fake'' hotpluggability for IDE/ATA
drives, which most revolves around putting in some kind of
conversion to an hotpluggable interface. Convertors to USB2,
FW and SATA are fairly easily available and cheap.

I use a similar trick which gives me for very little money
effective (external, but it could be internal) hotpluggability:
an external 5.25" USB2/FW box with a 3.5"->5.25" caddy in:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/xart/I/hwExtSlotDisk1.jpg
  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/xart/I/hwExtSlotDisk2.jpg

BTW, it is _much_ better to use FW than USB2 for external hard
discs if one cares about reliability.


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