Removable hard disk caddies: the good, the bad?

Topic

New Reply

I’m interested in using removable hard drives for backup, with a “drawer” in a drive bay and a plug-in caddy for each drive. I’ve found several such products for sale, such as this one on Amazon.com. So far, though, I’ve found no reviews or guides to this category of device.

I’m concerned about their reliability, but even more, about the amount of protection that the caddies provide. For example, what are a drive’s chances of survival if it gets dropped from desk level onto a carpeted floor?

Does anyone have experience to share with these devices, good or bad?

Reply | Quote

Replies

Searching for ”shock proof” “hard drive” seems to give a fair few hits….
HTH

Reply | Quote

I designed my current system on using these items, alas not good results. We came to the decision that they were BIOS dependent. Yes I know of people using them, particularly in a classroom situation, in my system nothing but problems.
I purchased 4 units because they are sold as a unit not components. Two units remain unopened.
They were on my research the best available in Australia.

Reply | Quote

unkamunka, that search does yield hits, but I don’t see any that relate to the devices I’m interested in. Have I missed something?

e_ogrady, it’s odd that these devices would be BIOS dependent, since they appear to be nothing more than a mechanical provision for hot-swapping drives and protecting them when they’re unplugged. In other words, the computer shouldn’t know the difference between a hard drive that’s plugged in to a drive bay and one that’s bolted to the frame. Could you expand on what led you to that conclusion?

Reply | Quote

unkamunka, that search does yield hits, but I don’t see any that relate to the devices I’m interested in. Have I missed something?

e_ogrady, it’s odd that these devices would be BIOS dependent, since they appear to be nothing more than a mechanical provision for hot-swapping drives and protecting them when they’re unplugged. In other words, the computer shouldn’t know the difference between a hard drive that’s plugged in to a drive bay and one that’s bolted to the frame. Could you expand on what led you to that conclusion?

I don’t understand Ed’s problem either. I’ve used enclosures for a long, long time and NEVER had any conflicts. I still have two machines here with two enclosures each and one at my son’s home. When I was last employed I had at least one in EVERY machine that I was responsible for – just for backup purposes. NEVER had a problem.

I should say that my experience was completely with IDE and I don’t know if such enclosures exist for SATA drives or not. Here’s an example of which I (still) have a few unused ones around the house.

Lian Li Hard Drive Mobile Rack Kit for 3.5″ IDE w/ Electronic key lock: RH-32 (Beige, Retail)

Reply | Quote

My system was/is populated with 5 internal HDD and the caddy, the boot drive is RAID 1 (imaged) as in the previous post I used only 1 of the caddies and two drawers, these drawers had two different brand drives from memory a Seagate 500 and a WD 300. Every time the caddy was removed the system would give a BSOD. However if you changed the drawer while the system was off it would boot perfectly, it would not hot swap.
The M/B is an asus M2N32-SLI DELUXE the graphic below shows the analysis from Belarc.
This is all to say when we removed the Caddy, the system has been stable.
They were SATA.
As explained earlier drive C is RAID
Drive D, E & F is one physical drive partitioned
Drive G & H is one physical drive partitioned
Drive I is one drive.
The other header on the board was used for the caddy.
The last computer course I attended was basically controlled with caddies, hence my direction. I have only heard of one other person experiencing the problems similar to mine.
QUESTION If the BIOS on the m/b detects the HDD on boot how does it change when different drives are inserted hot?

Reply | Quote

e_ogrady, forgive me for asking a question that may seem foolish, but I want to cover all bases. Did you consistently use the Eject command, or disable disk caching? Failure to do either of those things could account for the experience you had.

Reply | Quote

Did not use the eject command nor disable disk caching. It was on hot swapping where the problem occurred. The only difference to the system is that the RAID was on the motherboard whereas now it is on am Adaptec card. Whether that contributed is unknown. We spent hours trying to stabilize this computer, it is great now and only improved when the caddie was removed. As I said I have 4 units 2 completely unopened. They were the best from reviews.

Reply | Quote