John Miller wrote:
Nate Duehr wrote:Bob wrote:Sorry for the OT post but I know a few round here are well informed on the storage industry. I'm just about to migrate a bunch of PCs to SATA from IDE as the IDE drive caddies are failing [0] and I already have my server and a few PCs using SATA, what I'm looking for is a drivebay / backplane manufacturer that has 5, 4, 3 and 1 slot internal bays available that use the *same* tray / housing / caddie. The tray / housing / caddie doesn't have to be rugged [1] or cover the whole drive, it would just be *really* convenient to be able to move drives around at will. My search (below) hasn't helped much, has anyone round here got any suggestions? sata "removable (disk | drive | harddrive) (caddy | bay | drawer | tray)" single multi Thanks [0] I think all ATA removable bays take a bunch of liberties with the standard anyway and these were cheap and are old [1] which I suppose by definition means it's not a caddie<fx> crickets, cicadas and frogs </fx> Alternatively if you can think of a better forum for this post a link would also be appreciated.The folks on the Debian-ISP list probably deal with this type of hardware quite a bit more than the average Debian home user on the main user list?Forwarding this to debian-isp, but I'll try to answer in the meantime.
Thanks for that, I'll check that list on the gooja view thingy
Are your PCs rackmount, server-class towers, or regular consumer cases? The servers I've worked with have all had their caddies and backplanesprovided by the case manufacturer; all the caddies have been interchangeable, but not between server/case manufacturers. I've not seen a server case manufacturer that also makes a single-drive hotswap bay. I haven't seen a desktop case with built-in hotswap, either.
I'm using a variety of consumer cases so I'm talking about the units that slide into the CDRom bays, there are lots of them about but most seem to do 3, 4 & 5 bay jobs that take up 2 or 3 half height drive bays and utilise slim trays OR single drive bays that use a rugged enclosure that isn't interchangeable with anything.
>From Googling around, I found cooldrives.com, which advertises externaldrive enclosures. Perhaps something like that's an option for you? Also looks like Thermaltake makes a single-drive SATA hotswap bay, whichcould be useful Good luck to you in your search!
Cooldrives came up in my search as well and I could go external but for the moment I'd rather not, our file server and my PC has 10 half height bays (the whole front is CDRom bays) and various workstations have between 3 and 5 bays, it just occurred to me that a lot of admin, tasks would be so much easer if I could put any drive in any box.
Down \/ there Joe put me onto www.startech.com who have a tray less system in 4 , 3 & 1 bay varieties which, assuming I can find them in Singapore, will be perfect.
Thanks for you help.