Andy Axnot wrote in
message ...
Timothy Daniels wrote
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.

But you did say that they arent exactly high performance drives.

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.

And you may get quite a surprise if you
checked the error rate seen on those cables.

There is really nothing esoteric about these racks or caddies.

Yes, but they do flout the specs of the ATA ribbon cable.

They essentially serve as a short IDE "extension cord".

Which isnt even allowed for in the ATA standard.

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.

Which also flouts the ATA standard.

In practice, this seems to present no problems.

You admit you havent tested whether there are problems.

Plenty have found problems with removable drive bays.

But I can certainly understand that it might
be stretching the standards just a bit

A hell of a lot, actually, particularly that extra connector
which was never designed for that sort of use.

and that it *could* risk data integrity
by lengthening the cable run a bit

Thats not the problem.

and adding an 2 additional connections.

Thats the problem.

It might be that there is some slight increase
in the occurrence of data corruption.

It can be rather more than slight.

I don't know enough about how this is
handled by either the hardware or the
software to know if this could be significant.

It can see the OS decide that the drive is flakey.

Interesting thread, this.