Using a Caddy to swap Hard Drives?

WaveLab
1

I’m thinking about building a new DAW, but given the money this is going to cost I can better justify doing this if I can use the machine for other purposes as well. Rather than dual or triple-booting, I’m thinking about using a drive caddy to simply change out the OS drive and so change the machine when I need to. I can see that different caddies have different speeds (some sata 1, some sata 2, some sata 3) but apart from that is there anything else that I need to be aware of in terms of impact on performance? Does anybody else use a caddy with their DAW? Any views/experiences gratefully received.

Thanks,

Steve.

2

I use these on all of mine and find they’re great. Just turn off the drive you don’t want and turn on the one you want to boot.

http://www.istarusa.com/istarusa/products.php?series=HDDCage&sub=SATA/%20SAS&model=BPU-340SATA

3

Roger, this looks absolutely spot on for me.

Just to check my understanding: are you saying that with one of these multi-disk hot-swap trays you can turn individual disks on and off?

Thanks again,

Steve.

4

Okay so some further research shows me that these multi-disk caddies (or at least some of them) do indeed have individual power switches to each of the disks in the caddy. In the UK, the cheapest I can find for such a caddy is around £70 - £80. This is a lot of money given that the main functionality for my purpose is turning on and off boot disks without physically swapping and without dual-booting.

I suppose I could botch up some kind of switch array on a HDD enclosure blanking plate, but that would probably look a bit naff. Any ready-made solutions to this that won’t break the bank?

Steve

5

I guess the price is dependent on how many drive trays do you need. Mine were over 100 bucks each (3 of the iStarUSA BPU-340SATA-RED) Canadian from Tiger Direct.

6

you could always use one of these ;

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=antec+drive+caddy&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=14542548012400090546&sa=X&ei=KLGRTabLO4qKhQe76fWYDw&ved=0CDkQ8wIwAg#


I have one in my machine, I just push a SATA drive in and then usually clone or copy drives for backup, works great.



MC

7

we use this from ICY Box (Raidsonic)
“This trayless mobile rack is designed for fast and frequent changes of the hard disc drives.”

8

Thanks all very much for the suggestions.

First of all, it’s good to hear that other people are using caddies without any problems. From my point of view, I was going to look at an individual caddy as suggested by Norbury Brook and by Ray, until I saw Roger’s suggestion of the multi disk caddies. Ironically I would not use the multi-disk caddy to swap out disks, I would use it to turn on and off static hard disks - which is why it would be a lot of money for me to spend just for that purpose. Now, I just need to decide how much money I want to spend!

Thanks again,

Steve.

9

I have used these in 2 systems.

Has a fan to keep the drive cool.

10

Thanks Tom.

So many choices, so little time!

Steve.

11

A long time down the track from this thread, but having had my 6-way Icydock 2.5" caddy go unreliable on me (like failing on half the boot ups) recently, I went for a US$13 6-way SATA power cable switch, allowing individual switching of each drive power from the front panel of a 5.25" drive bay.

Much more convenient and reliable, while not exposing the drives’ contacts to stress from connecting and disconnecting.

12

Nice. And cheaper too?

Steve