"Now can we talk about removable harddrives?"
LOL--shades of discussions past! ZP, I couldn't agree more--and this is precisely why I've used removable drive trays for years. You can't beat the price, speed, or reusability.
Sean's point about how they aren't designed to do this is well taken. But I think they are much less fragile than they used to be. 10 years ago, manufacturing tech wasn't nearly as advanced; moreover, every Tom, Dick, and Harry wasn't buying new hard drives at Comp USA. As they've become a publicly consumed commodity, they've had to be made more durably or the manufacturers would be swamped with warranty claims.
Hard drives also do so many duties. The diamondmax 2880 line, for instance, is now a year old, yet still is more than adequate for a main system drive, part of a fasttrak RAID configuration, use as a KOT drive, use as backup, or as a "hand-me-down" to a wife's or friends' system if one simply must have the latest and greatest. This just isn't the case to the same degree with, e.g., an old travan tape drive or cartridges.
(BTW, FWIW I still hate tape. Sean and others made some good points in its favor, but I still don't see what it can do that a combination of extra HDD's and zip/LS-120's CD-RW can't do more elegantly and quickly, provided one uses tools like drive image and partition magic correctly.)
I have found that cheap $15 IDE drive frames work fine, provided that one uses a drive that isn't too hot to begin with (again, cool parts are happy parts) and has lots of ventilation.
One subtle improvement that helps out here: most newer IDE drives let you maintain one setting for Master only and master/slave, whereas many older drives (though the Segate Medalist Pros, even) required different jumper settings. A real PITA if you want to be able to shut down, remove or add a slave IDE onto a channel, and go. All of the maxtors have this benefit; would be curious to hear if the IBM's and others do as well.
I got 3 5.7 gig maxtors during the comp USA labor day sale for $150- $50 = $100, with a free after rebate 32 meg EDO stick thrown in (tho I had to hassle MGV to get the latter rebate.) I found good uses for all of them in my 2 machines here. I will probably buy 2 more during this promotion, even though it isn't quite the same screaming buy. One reason it isn't is that these drives are most likely 2880s, rather than the newer, faster 4320s (tho some have observed that they get the newer models at the same or bigger capacities in COMP USA boxes--which would be a real coup.)
There's a start. What else would you like to talk about regarding this, ZP (or others?) |
