Externally connecting internal IDE drives

Nov 28, 2004 6 Replies
N

I have a very large and complex rack-mounted box which contains a 14-slot ISA bus passive backplane [physically divided into 2 separate PC segments] and 12 cards of various sorts installed. The box has physical room for mounting 3 drives in the front opening in which I have a floppy and 2 removable HD frames for one of the PC's and I have internally mounted a permanent HD and made a cutout in the back panel for a floppy for the second PC in the box. Everything works well ... Until I need to attach a CDROM drive to one of the PC's. Currently I've got the cables from the secondary IDE controllers and a power cable hanging outside the box and I simply hang a CDROM drive (or a temporarily needed HD) from the cables. That's ugly and, even though it's a very low traffic area, still quite unstable and probably unsafe as well.



SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs & CDROMs externally?



TIA Norm



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C

You could attach a USB, firewire, or SCSI drive.

The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to minimize spam. Our true address is of the form che...@prodigy.net.
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R

-USB mass storage

-network mapped

-lots of superglue

Pozdrawiam.

RusH // http://randki.o2.pl/profil.php?id_r=352019 Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery. You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.
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M

Use the same circuit the external USB/Firewire boxes use. It converts USB and/or Firewire to IDE. You probably need a dedicated cisrcuit for each drive. Then you can use a USB or Firewire cable to connect to your PC. The drives can even be hot-plugged (is four power-supply allows).

Markus

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A

Norm

You can still get removable IDE drive cases "caddys" where you mount a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" case. Some of these are hot-swappable although that does depend on which OS you are using...

That would work for the hard discs. CD-ROMs are more problematic: USB or Firewire as others have suggested would probably be best. Try googling for hot swap cd drive.

Andrew

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H

Please note there isn't really any such thing as an "internal" IDE/ATAPI device --- they're all internal by definition. The only question to decide upon is "internal to _what_?" The design assumes a PC or something like it, but there are alternatives, most prominently in the form of separate boxes that hold an ide drive and connect it to something else.

The big problem is an electrical one: IDE/ATAPI is not at all designed to be hot-swappable, and not particularly friendly with the concept of external mounting. Note that there's not even a standardized plug for external IDE cables --- the allowed cable length of about 80 cm (40 cm in some cases) would make any non-neglible amount of external cable a fragile concept anyway.

My recommendation would be to forget about using IDE itself as the attachment method for those movable drives. Use USB, Firewire, or ethernet instead.

Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de) Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
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R

USB 2.0 is fast, hot-socketable, Win XP compatible, and the interface from IDE to USB is pretty cheap (

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