Ide rermovable disk/hotswap capabilities

[corrs_fan]

in trying to get my backups easier to use, i was thinking of using a few of those IDE removable drive chasis things, that connect straight to the IDE cables. their dirt cheap, but can anyone tell me the following:

has anyone seen hard disk removable drive things, but with a powerswitch.

if i did decide to hotswap the drives would hotswap work, or does this only seek for scsi/iee1394/usb in order to work.

If it does work, how does it compensate for disks of different capacities??

i cannot get my USB 2 gerar to work under ANY kernel (great under XP), but its too slow, even after the USB 2 patch, to back up 60GB of stuff...

Thanks
_________________
Some say "The glass is half empty",
I usually say "Eh, There was a Glass.."

[bombcar]

I've done this before; but don't quote me.

If you umount the drive (say, hdc) with

umount /dev/hdc1

and then issue a hdparm command to tell it to go to sleep:

hdparm -Y /dev/hdc

then you SHOULD be able to remove power from the drive and then disconnect it. I've done it; it worked for me. Notice however that anything that tries to spin it back up (for example: automount!) without it connected it will probably hang the machine.

What I did with this was transfer 100s of MBs back before the days of cheap ZIP disks. Two computers, one disk, and selective mounting.

Eh; make sure the disk is two of the following three: 1. Cheap, 2. Old, 3. Under Warranty

Don't blame me if they won't take a drive back that has been fried to a crisp!

My official recommendation: Firewire. See http://www.dansdata.com/drivedocks.htm for another more useful solution (you'll have to buy a firewire card, but you've always wanted an newer card, right?

[corrs_fan]

I really do like the look of that FW thing, but at $60-80 for shipping it is _NOT_ going to happen.

I have seen FW external enclosures locally for £40 + a card is £25 quid (but id rather just get a new jetway polaris mainboard at £60, and get sata, ETC too)

I take it from your experiences firewire just works ???
_________________
Some say "The glass is half empty",
I usually say "Eh, There was a Glass.."

[bombcar]

But I trust Dan of dansdata.com pretty well.

And firewire was designed to be hotswap - the adapter should be available locally.

Otherwise, a separate USB or Firewire drive is the way to go. I don't have one, unfortunately.

(I hear the Apple IPod is a firewire disk

-Tom

[corrs_fan]

YYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS

My new firewire enclosure & card work a treat, you wouldnt believe how happy this makes me. Ive spent about a week batling with an otherwise perfectly configured USB2 drive segfaulting, on the first write attempt, every time. Ive tried everytrhing too including new kernels, modules/options/acpi settings you name it.

Im SO happy right now
_________________
Some say "The glass is half empty",
I usually say "Eh, There was a Glass.."