Right then, i've been set a challenge by a friend. We have sat on a shelf 4x200Gb hard disks that we would like to put to use moving large "Graphics" files around between 3 different locations. THe main issue we have is one of th ecomputers cannot under any circumstances be rebooted more than once a day as it acts a Network server for an educational establishment.

We are trying to figure out if there is a way we can hot swap the drives. Neither of us has any real knowledge about it as neither of us has actually had to do it much before (i have inthe past but i was using SCSI on a PowerMac and it allows you to mount drives as you please). We have removable Hard Disk cradels as the server is raided and the backup disk lives on the cradle and is changed each day at 8am when tey reboot it. Hence the server drive is never hot swapped as well.

Can ANyone point me in the right direction as to either How to do it, or a site that will give us a decent set of instruction. Every time you think you know as much as you need SOMETHING else pops up dunnit?

Your best bet for a fast, external, hot-swappable storage solution is probably an external USB2/Firewire box for the HDs mate. No real speed difference between the two, and external boxes can be had for as little as 50 quid (I should know, I've got one ). Crummy old 10gb Maxtor in it that I use when I need to fix up a PC away from my own machine, although I've had a new 7.2k 120gb WD drive in it too with no problems.

Aside from 1394/USB2, I don't think there's any cheap way to do what you're looking to do with ATA drives.

~Ment~

Ment hit it in one.

Yup, removable drive cages, and in general normal IDE's do not like to be hot-swapped. I have read some of the sata drives can handle it and you can use external sata boxes, but the USB2 is much better solution. To handle a 200GB HD you will need one with external power. There are mini-boxes that can handle 40GB max desktop drives that are powered by the usb power.