Hot swap hard drives

[weazol]

Lately i have been seeing alot of external enclosures that allow hot swapping sata hard drives (by hot swap i mean pull one hard drive out plug in the next)

I was wondering if anyone knew of one of these for IDE (or pata) harddrives
I have a ton of old Laptop ide harddrives that range from 40gigs - 180 gigs and it would be nice to have an external enclosure that i could swap them in and out of without the need of taking the whole thing apart.

[FireArrow]

I know there is some kind of docking station for IDE-drives that allow you to use normal drives as external drives, allowing easy hotswapping.
I can't remember what they are called though... Anyone else remember (or even know what I'm talking about at all)?

EDIT: I'm not talking about cabinets.

[questio verum]

I've heard of users (through sheer dumb luck) being able to successfully unplug & replug an IDE drive. But I wouldn't recommend it. The potential for an ESD-induced drive or motherboard failure is massive. The best approach is to convert the IDE interface to another interface, such as USB or SCSI Here's an example of the first.

I've heard that the present kernel has no problem dealing with IDE hot-swapping, but I've never tried it, so I wouldn't know.

[weazol]

wasnt quite what i was looking for but i found what i am looking for through the same company
Newegg.com - ICY DOCK MB452 Series MB452UK-S Aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 External Enclosure - External Enclosures

[drl]

Hi.

I have been using frame / carriers for a number of years. I have perhaps 20 carriers for a number of boxes. I did not need the hot-swap capability, just an easy method for changing drives (for protection: I was bitten once with a multi-boot install that wrote over a disk). Although these days I am using more and more VMs, I have begun switching over from (P)ATA to SATA. Once I get to a critical mass, I plan to begin using SATA frame / carrier systems. After some research, I settled on the brand noted below -- this is for PATA, and they seem to have an extensive line of SATA as well. The ones I currently use are plastic, whereas those below are aluminum, some with more than one fan.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

Kingwin KF-21 Black Hard Drive Mobile Rack ATA 133 & Fan KF-21-IPF-B at Global Computer

[oz]

These work really well for IDE or SATA drives:

Newegg.com - AcomData, External Enclosures, Computer Cases