Roll Your Own Hotswap SATA Guide
Guide and photos by Rick Stephens
MacGurus’ build your own SATA hotswap guide is a supplement to the
Roll Your Own
SATA Guide.
We welcome you and look forward to your thoughts and comments
on the contents of this guide. The procedures outlined in this guide are
basic and require a minimum of tools, in fact only a philips screw driver.
I like to use a magnetic tip screw driver for most all my assembly work, I
know more than a couple of pretty good technicians who recommend against that
because
it is possible to cause damage to data stored on magnetic based media like
hard drives or even on eprom chips if the magnetic field interacts with them. Caution
is advised if you choose to use one yourself.
MacGurus Hotswap
SATA Kits are built using two, four, five or eight bay Burly enclosures.
The highest quality cables, mounting brackets, drives and hotswap bays.
The
kit used
for the purposes of this guide is
the 2 Bay Burly with Hotswap Trays and 2
SATA hard
drives. The Gurus even include generous amounts
of extra mounting screws.
These Hotswap Drive Tray enclosures have many advantages over run of
the mill ’fixed drive’ enclosures, not least of all is the ease of initial
assembly and installation. Nothing else comes close for a simple and rugged
multidrive external enclosure in time, tools and minimal experience needed
for the assembly.
One of the biggest advantages though is the very inexpensive
drive trays. The ease
of
swapping
making these
a prime
archival
system as well. With hard drive costs well under a dollar
a GigaByte, using them for backup space and storing the drive in its protective
hotswap tray makes
not only great economic sense but gives you the highest speed and most convenient
archival storage media possible.
For those ’on the go’ Mac users who need their data at multiple locations,
hauling around a big multidrive enclosure is not a great option. Tossing
a handful of
drive trays in your briefcase is a piece of cake though. A Terabyte or more can be easily carried without undue strain.
Hotswap capable host cards are here. Our
PC
brethern
will find these enclsoures will work with full hotswap capability
for them on their hotswap capable host cards.
With a non-hotswap host card you can remove drives in hotswap bays
without
shutting down. You just drag the drives
to the
trash to dismount
them, and then
power the trays
down by turning
the key allowing their removal. But you will need to have the drives
powered up and attached before booting up your computer when you mount
them. Hopefully this
too is resolved soon. Hotswap hosts allow you to power up the enclosure
while the computer remains running and they will hot mount the drives.
These instructions will serve perfectly for 4, 5 and 8 Bay Burly Hotswap Kits
as well, just double up the number of components you will be installing.
Total time for assembly should be on the order of one half to one hour. Better
give it an extra half hour if, like me, you get your 5 year old to help.
The goal, a top quality enclosure
Start out removing the Burly top cover and the front panel snap in
plastic bezels. The bezels just snap out easily.
Assemble your internal Chassis
Mount cables to the Centronics Brackets. The screws come packaged
with the cable and bracket. Install just like the picture and then remove
one of the outer screws for the next step.
Some enclosure kits now ship with a dual port adapter since they may have less backplane
cutouts than drives. With these adapters you use the outer cable attachment screws
to mount in the backplane. As with the single adapter, you'll need to leave out one screw and leave the other one loose.
The Gurus Certify These Instructions Work!
