"Timothy Daniels" wrote in message
...

"Andy Axnot" wrote:.

Well, sometimes ignorance is bliss. Not knowing any better,
I use the cheap (about $8) mobile racks from Genica,
available at, for instance:
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN210

I have used these for several years, mostly with Win98SE,
without any great problems that I'm aware of....

Andy, what was the data rate of the fastest drive you used?
It's possible that the "kludge" and the spec "flout" that some
refer to only has a deleterious effect with the faster drive interfaces.
Also, do you use the standard 80-wire ribbon cable, the standard
40-wire ribbon cable, or some length of "round" cable?

The student computer labs at the local campus of the University
of California use Kingwin removeable drive caddies, and the lab
technicians say that there have been no problems.

*TimDaniels*

Hmmm... that's interesting. There seems to be a lot of us using these
caddies.

Well, I have used up to ATA133 drives. The IDE cables I use are 80 wire
ribbon cables, as are the short internal cables inside the trays. I have
never tested the data transfer in any way other than normal use.

There is really nothing esoteric about these racks or caddies. They
essentially serve as a short IDE "extension cord". A hard drive in one of
these racks is connected to the regular IDE cable through an additional 2 or
3 inches of 80 wire IDE cable and the Centronics connector that connects the
removable and fixed parts of the rack.

In practice, this seems to present no problems. But I can certainly
understand that it might be stretching the standards just a bit and that it
*could* risk data integrity by lengthening the cable run a bit and adding an
2 additional connections. It might be that there is some slight increase in
the occurrence of data corruption. I don't know enough about how this is
handled by either the hardware or the software to know if this could be
significant.

Interesting thread, this.

Andy