Drive Drawer or External Housing?

I just bought a 200 GB on sale at Staples to knock back my drive needs for another few years.

I have a 2 year old Presario with XP home.

My current drive configuration is a 40GB internal, another 40GB, and a 160 GB external.

The 40GB internal that came with the computer has to remain the home drive since the restore partition is on it. Even though I made a backup, I don't want to lose the capability to restore if everything crashes.

I am considering an external housing or a drive drawer. For about $40, I can place the 200 GB as an additional external. For the same money I can purchase a drive drawer and an extra chassis and swap out the 40GB and 200GB. This would allow me to take a full backup of the C: drive on the 40GB drive and swap it for the 200GB.

Of course, this might require some changes to my PC chassis, since the three 5 1/2 inch slots are being used and the remaining slot, which does have a removable plate exterior, seems to be fit for a 3.5 inch drive. It is made of punch metal, though, and seems to be adjustable.

Can anyone tell me the benefits of a swappable drive vs a USB 2.0 external?

I've had poor experience with drive trays. They tend to fail rather regularly.

You can use the external enclosure as a removable drive bay by simply leaving the case open and swapping the drives in it. It's one step more than hot swappable. All you have to do is unplug the usb cable before swapping the drive in the enclosure.

External enclosures are cheap enough that you can buy two of them and just swap the USB cable. Make sure the enclosure is plugged into the same battery backup that the system is plugged into.

Rich,

I highly recommend the external drive case. I have had nothing but issues with removable drive bays.

External drive bays are much better, esp. the firewire ones (I have one on my Mac, and will be adding a second this xmas).

I did run two external USB 2.0 drives at one time on my old Dell. They worked incredibly well.

Mitch

I'm looking at getting an external drive as well, though I am looking at getting an ethernet one so both my Linux desktop and OS X Powerbook can use it at the same time. Any recommendations?

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I picked up a Compusa aluminum external housing today for $30 with a one-button backup. With the $30 I paid for the Maxtor 200GB, I now have a 200 GB USB external for $60.

P.S. I did have to call up Staples for the additional $40 on the hard drive. It seems the price I was charged did not include the promised $40 instant rebate.

Now all I need is a safe and legal way to fill up 200 GB of extra storage.

Sperlock,

I'd just recommend the following:

1. A Firewire/USB 2.0 drive that you can either switch or share out via the Linux box via NFS or Samba. Why bother connecting the drive to both when Linux can do an excellent job of sharing it out?

You already have a desktop with very capable networking capabilities. Why not use it on the Linux box, format it for use with a good journaling file system (ext3 or Reiser4), and share it with the Linux box?

The reason why I suggest this is because you already have a Linux box. Most of these "network drives" are nothing but a small embedded Linux or Wind River system running on Ethernet, usually with a much slower (think ARM) CPU, sharing the drive out via a modified version of Samba.

If you share out a USB 2.0 or Firewire drive on your Linux box, you will gain much faster file sharing speed due to Samba, a much better file system if you use Reiser4 or ext3, and security you can integrate with your existing Linux user accounts via OS X.

You've got 90% of the solution already. No need to reinvent the wheel :).

Mitch

Why? Because I haven't messed with NFS or Samba (except way back in college around the Red Hat 6.0 days) and would need to learn it. Is there a How-To out there that you would recommend that would guide me on what I would need to do to set this up?

Thanks, Mitch.

What about SCSI , I have a SCSI 2 fast card for my scanner( hp4c ) and zip drive , what about external drive with this , i have 5 addresses left .
What about an external cace with a RAID array of EX server drives ??

Sperlock,

I found this one:

http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/docs/samba.html

May I ask what distro you run?

Thanks,

Mitch

Thanks, I will check it out. I'm running Gentoo.