Hard Drive Selector

[malebolgia]

A couple years ago I heard of a hard drive switcher device. I was called Trios, but after find it online I was wondering if anyone else has a similar product. Mainly because this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and I think the company is out of business. If anyone knows of a similar device, please reply.

More Information Here

 

[Met-AL]

Here is a "software" one. I used to use it back when I dual booted with Win98 and W2k

http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm

 

[Othersider]

Easiest solution is just to get a removable rack and extra trays to swap in whichever drive you want.

 

[Bullitt]

or a DIY solution to only apply power to the drive(s) that you want active.

 

[Met-AL]

Does that work all the time? I remember one time when I was doing some drive swapping I got lazy and decided to just unplug the power from the hard drive I wanted left out, and the motherboard hung trying to detect the drives. Shut er off and unplugged the IDE cable and it booted fine.

I am thinking it works for some motherboards and not others.......

Of course there is the posibility that I am way off track also............

 

[compslckr]

Does that work all the time? I remember one time when I was doing some drive swapping I got lazy and decided to just unplug the power from the hard drive I wanted left out, and the motherboard hung trying to detect the drives. Shut er off and unplugged the IDE cable and it booted fine.

I am thinking it works for some motherboards and not others.......

Of course there is the posibility that I am way off track also............

i do the power thing on my xbox and it works fine. basically i have the stock hard drive and a 200gb harddrive with some apps and miscalanious other legal stuff on it. when i want to do xbox live i turn power to the 200gb off and power to the stock hd on, when i want to do other stuff i do the opposite and it works really well

 

[arkamw]

Does that work all the time? I remember one time when I was doing some drive swapping I got lazy and decided to just unplug the power from the hard drive I wanted left out, and the motherboard hung trying to detect the drives. Shut er off and unplugged the IDE cable and it booted fine.

I am thinking it works for some motherboards and not others.......

Of course there is the posibility that I am way off track also............

I think that is more going to depend on the drive that you have hooked up and how forgiving the mobo is on detecting drives. Some of the hard drives of yore (and even today) had the jumper setting that were "master w/ slave present" and the drive / mobo didn't like it at all if the required drive wasn't there.

You shouldn't get the same result if you were to use a drive combo in cable select mode. However, if you leave the mobo set to auto-detect drives, it might not be happy if it is looking for a particular drive on a channel and doesn't find it.

If you want to keep doing it this way, easiest thing to do (if you run into it) is to go into your BIOS and manually set the IDE channels. Example: you have primary channel set to auto master and auto slave and you want to power off the master, set the BIOS to "none" for primary master. Again, though, this is going to depend on how forgiving your mobo is.