PCA Forums

a while ago i saw a small module that u connected power to internally and then connected up to 3 hard drives to it with power and IDE
on the front it had a push button to select which hard drive was active
thus giving u a drive to select from when u booted the computer without partitioning

im looking for this device again with no luck
ive seen items like it on google when searching for "hard drive switch"
but it yielded a box that costed 400 USD

Your talking about the Romtec Trios II Multiple Hard Drive Selector which is 69$ over at TigerDirect, or the 45$ Romtec Trios I (Link goes to ROmtec's site, couldn't find a place that sells the Trios I in a quick search)

Ah ha, found it. Romtec Trio RX-910T6 - $48.95 over at Axiontech (I've bought from them before, IIRC things went pretty smooth)

You DO know that you can do the same thing from BIOS? Just disable all the drives except the one you want to use. Your OS will boot from any drive on either IDE port - doesn't have to be the Primary Master.

of course i know
but i dont want to be going into the bios every time i want to switch an OS
i just wanna reboot and press a button
call me lazy but its easier and im not really risking the bios

THANK U ALL THE TRIOS 1 is exactly what i want

buy a couple of $10- removable hdd bays and then set your BIOS to auto detect

swap the bays or leave both in and turn them on/off

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN210

*these are also available in black

yea, i did the later, had 3 removable drives at one time each with its own OS, worked great and i could phically move drives, and take data with me when i needed to.

Not sure about all of the systems, but I think some have a hot key you can press durring bootup to choose witch drive to boot from like you do using a dual boot O/s.

At least one of my systems had that, but I generally just set the boot drive in bios to which ever one I wanted.

How's that trios drive selector working for those of ya with one? I thought about one of those myself, problem was I want all drives availble and the files on those drives available too, just boot to different setups on different dirves.

Looked like to me that your only using certian drives with the trios and the others are not usable at the same time.

I saw something similar but a key switch once. The drives are just swapped master/slave depending the position of the key. Both are useable and connected. I think the switch connects to the jumpers on the drives, both the master and slave jumpers on both drives, then turning the key just selects which jumpers are used on which drives.

Don't know how well either type works.

For now I think I'll just build more systems and swap monitors

You don't want the Trio I then if you want a master/slave setup, as it seperates each drive. THe trios 2 does it though, and has a neat PCI card with the controller that plugs into it.

But, tbh, just build your own. It's pretty simple. I could explain in great detail, but Kevin Rose of The Screen Savers fame has already done so here.

It's basically a cable select system with the switch one way, and the drives reversed via 'jumpers' with the switch the other way, and works pretty afaik

I'v got a ? with that hard drive switcher thiny can u have to OS's running like use one as a a file sharing computer and on for gameing like have one all ways on and downloading stuff and the othere on playing say qake on the internet?

I don't think so.

All they really do as far as I know is let you decide which drive to boot from. So if your like me and have win 98 and programs on one drive and win 2k and programs on a second drive you want to keep seperated then you can choose what 1 drive you want to use. Or with some you can set one drive to master and boot to that O/s and still use the other for file storage. Depends what type switch you get.
But you can't boot to 2 O/s at once on different drives if thats what you meant.

Also another use for one would be if you had 6 IDE devices but only 4 connections, like 4 Hardrives a dvd drive and a cd burner.
You could set up the 4 hardrives with the drive selectors and use any 2 at the same time and still always have the CD burner and DVD drive available.

I was thinking about the last option myself once but changed my mind about it. Get 2 of the switches and set them up with 2 drives on each switch. That way I could have different drives for different purposes.

One thing I wasn't sure about on the trios is if it is like a hot swap and if you can just press the button to go from drive to drive while the system is running (for slave drives, not boot drives) or if you have to reboot or shut down in order to switch drives.

Anyone know about that? If I used a 3 drive selector, can I go from a 60gig data slave drive to my 80 gig video slave drive just by pushing the button or flipping a key while the system is running? Sort of a hot swap?
Or do I need to shut down then swap?

I also thought about the removable hdd bays , but the way I lose things

Hey Judg3,

I tried that link and got an AMD page. What is it I am looking for? Didn't see off hand anything that looked like building my own switch, but not sure where it would be.