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Hardware

Select or Lock Hard Drives... With a Key 144

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-clever dept.
robvasquez writes "Dr. Tom has done a review of a great $16.95 hard disk swapper. This could be a great tool for those of use who dual boot, without bootloaders, or danger to other drives/partitions. Flip the key and power the system up to the OS of your choice. Sure beats popping IDE cables on and off drives and boards." Some things are so simple its amazing they aren't more common. Totally clever idea.
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Select or Lock Hard Drives... With a Key More

Select or Lock Hard Drives... With a Key

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  • Re:Words of warning (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did you even read the article? These have nothing to do with anything that would get "ripped out". There is no "yanking one out". It just closes or opens the master/slave jumper on 2 drives depending on where the key is turned. Stop karma whoring, asshole.

  • Re:I've found it helps a lot (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    check this link to evaluate adequacy.org (the link from alewando's sig. what bullshit!

    http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/ 7/21/12632/7944 [adequacy.org]

  • Re:how many newbies... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    yeah, tell me about it. My system at home currently loads three operating systems (win98se, win2k, and rh7.1). I installed linux first. After that, I installed win2k which killed lilo. So after restoring lilo, I realized that win2k sucks for games so I loaded win98se so that I could play some older games. win98se destroys both lilo and the win2k loader. So I booted off of the rh7.1 CD again, restored lilo, and booted back into win2k to fix its bootloader..

  • Re:Silly idea (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you have to hide it from her, you're doing it wrong.

  • Re:Hmm.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If it supports IDE, it supports cable select. The jumpers are IN THE CABLE.

  • HOW DID THIS STORY MAKE IT THROUGH? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gee. I submitted a story, only about it being System Administrator Appreciation Day [sysadminday.com]. Rejected. About HackHU [hackhu.com] giving into the threat of legal action and going down. Rejected.

    And this piece of crap story makes it through?!?

  • I've found it helps a lot (Score:4)

    by alewando ( 854 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:54PM (#2187714)
    Harddrive swapping was a good idea three years ago, but the support hadn't really come through from the industry. Today's a different question entirely.

    Now that I've gotten a few nicklocks, I can
    • Keep a mirror drive handy when the one I do my development on dies.
    • Bring my code with me without having to juggle zipdisks or upload enormous files.
    • Use Linux on standard machine configurations without having to repartition the local harddisk or otherwise disturb my friends' computers much.


    I honestly can't speak highly enough about them. Of course it hasn't solve all the problems with IRQ conflicts I run into, but it is a step in the right direction and a welcome addition to my home computing environment.

    The only site on the Internet that gets it right [adequacy.org].
  • Well yes. I tried to explain VMWare to some of our technical people at work, and they were baffled. :(

    But even so, VMWare does have certain limitations because it emulates so many device drivers. Still VMWare is a pretty good solution for testing.

    There is also a new product from Connectix that claims to be similar. Unfortunately they don't have a trial, and it's by the same company that screwed me over back in 1995 with RAM Doubler.
  • Wow! You get to change between *two* hard drives!

    Removable hard drive trays are much better. (I use them for the few times I use Windows to isolate it from non-Windows data. MS does not play well with others.)

    One big warning on removable hard drive trays...

    When you buy them, buy twice as many as you think you will need. Make sure they are all the same brand and model. There are many places that make them and NO standard wiring for them. One brand may not work with the other or even fit in the tray slot. And worst of all, you may never find that brand again!

    Not fun when you have three (or more) boot drives and only two drive trays that work on the primary slot.
  • How are you gonna back up your 80 GB drive? Let's see, you could spend thousands of dollars on a tape drive that can handle that much data, or you can spend $200 on another 80 GB drive.

    It's a no brainer. Why is anyone buying tape drives any more?

  • many old, physically large disk drives on superminis and mainframes used to have a "drive select" plug with break-off tabs that you would stick into the front of the drive to select the unit number. Let's see, I want to change my boot disk to this unit over here, the system is set up to boot from dka0, let's just swap the device plugs.

    Get your soldering iron out and make your own. Use a 4pdt switch and select the master OR SLAVE jumper on each drive. The wiring is left as an exercise to the reader.
    there are 3 kinds of people:
    * those who can count

  • And this is one of the many reasons why SCSI
    is better. No master/slave crap or boot limitations. You can set the boot device
    ID in the SCSI BIOS to be any connected device.

    -Kevin
  • After reading the comments I've come to the conclusion that even out of the slashdot readers who read the article most don't know as much about IDE drives as they think that they do. Looks like Tom and the NickLock folks don't either.

    This thing might work if you just happen to have the right hard drives, but if you *don't*, you'll probably wind up ripping it out of the case with your bare hands, flinging it to the floor, and stomping it to powder.

  • http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/01q3/010727/ni cklock-02.html

    Quoted:
    Although it might have been useful to include a setting that lets you choose both drives, there is probably a good reason why NickLock only allows you to select between single drives or none. For one thing, only a few drives run as slave by default if no jumper mode is set. The majority of drives run in single or master mode by default, and if you use two of them, there is no way to assign the specific drives to master or slave, thus causing a conflict.

  • is that it switches the drive's from master to slave and vise versa. Unless I am wrong (It has happened before) you have two drives, each with an MBR and an OS. When you want RedmondOS, you switch to that drive and the other drive becomes a slave, if you want RealOS, you just switch that drive to master and the Redmond drive becomes slave. Did I miss something?

    --- This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine. ---

  • I've been using CRU's - http://www.cruinc.com Dataport IV for a few months. Comes as two components - one is a receiving slot that fits into your PC. It hooks up to your IDE or SCSI cable and contains a fan and lock mechanism. The second is a cartridge that holds a 3.5" drive. I have different cartridges containing different OS's. The only drawbacks I've seen is the fan is a little noisy and cartridges are not hot-swappable. (I used to work on Tandem Unix boxes with mirrored hot-swappable disks. You could yank a drive with the root partition and the box would keep running!)
  • My only complaint about this creative little device is that you would have to reach behind the computer case to turn the switch - something that isn't always so easy to do. How about extending the wires out of the case with a switch that could be positioned elsewhere - right next to the keyboard? OK, maybe not so secure but far more convenient ...
  • this is just supposed to make it more brainless...

    How does this make Windows more brainless? I didn't think that was possible.

    --
  • Back around 1995 or so I worked for a hardware distributor one of our vendors sold these so we bought some to test them out.

    At the time they were ok for us, we kept multiple OSes on multiple drives, no bootloader, let us run NT, DOS, Linux, Novell without much hassle. They were most useful for file storage. Since the Max HD size was much smaller in 95, we found times when it was useful for us to swap out entire HDs. Overall however the drives were sensitve to shock, and if you weren't careful you could damage the drives quite easily.

    Later I was working at a small university who used these in one of their labs, I can't quite say I understand why. They thought it a good idea. Here is where we found the biggest problems. The locks are of the $1.95 Hardware Store variety, and they are mounted in plastic. They may to a reasonable job holding a metal desk droor shut but student regularly would rip them right out the machine.

    Worse yet, they are not hot swappable. Which is fine if you remember never to yank them out while the machine is running. It is not fine the one time you yank one out while the machine is running.

    Before you buy one of these devices think about rather you really need it and remember:
    Bootloaders will allow you to boot most any operating system these days so it is unlikley this is really a good use of such a device.
    HDD's are getting bigger all the time, is a 16.95 drive caddy really worth it when you can buy a new HDD for only a few dollars a gigabyte.
    What OS do you run? How does it deal with drives and partitions? Sure bioses can autodetect different harddrive types, but will your OS like it? This isn't a problem ofcourse if its your boot drive.

    From my experience with these I would say they are a mixed blessing. Certainly bad for a non-controlled or production enviroment. On a personal machine they will work just fine (if you use care.) But I can't see myself buying anything like this in future. As I said, HDDs are far to cheap to make them all that useful, I can usually buy my current HD size+twice whatever I think I might need for under $200.

    Just my $0.02

  • These things have been around for years. Why the spotlight all of a sudden?

    --jordan
  • People, RTFA. Turning the key doesn't make one hard drive available and the other not available -- it just selects which is bootable. So you don't need three drives (i.e. Linux, Windows, Common Files), just two -- both drives are accessible at all times.

  • Reading the article (and looking at the pictures), it seems like this thing is really just a jumper switch. In one key position, neither jumper is closed, in the other two positions one of the two is closed.

    There has to be more interresting things to do with this. Hmmm... It could switch processor speed if your mobo has jumpers to select such things. It could switch IRQs for old ISA cards that conflict differently in Linux and Windows (hey, it could happen).

    Any other ideas? Maybe you could short it across two processor pins to provide a "self destruct" switch. :-)

    Greg

  • You can have access to both drives if you like. What this does is just switch the slave/master-jumbers ... nothing else.

    On drive1 it does switch between master and slave.
    On drive2 it does the same.

    Set up you bios to one harddisk.. no slaves...
    Voila...you can switch between the disks, and make the other disk inaccsessible.

    Set you bios to one master and one slave.. well, wouldn't be to complicated to guess.

  • Check out the romtec Trios [romtecusa.com]. It switches between three drives at the push of a button, and has a saftey feature that prevents you from accidentily switching after boot-up. The only downside is you can't access the data on one drive if you boot from another.
  • ... Windows more brainless? I didn't think that was possible.
    I don't know how. I don't know what. But Microsoft will find a way. It's called innovation.
  • Something like this was discussed in the AVS TiVo Forum [avsforum.com] not to long ago. The idea was that you could have your normal TiVo set of disk(s), and then you could have a second instance of TiVo that you use for programs you want to store long term.
  • I'm very disappointed that there's no way to access both drives. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that it would be fairly simply to wire this device up to switch pin configurations, particularly if you set jumpers on all pins. With some simple wiring, you could flip a switch to get the drives to align in any of the four possible IDE configurations. Perhaps this is a project for myself, as the overall idea is a good one.

    For those that say Lilo isn't that hard to set up, it isn't, but sometimes it's nice to have OS's on their own hard drives, with their own MBR. That way, you can completely blow away the drive and know you're only loosing the OS (and shared data) on that drive.

  • I thought that would be enough. I wasn't interested enough in the item to really do some fact checking on the manufacturer's website. Now that I've seen how it's done, I'll make one myself that doesn't take up a full sized bay, and doesn't cost me $16 USD.

    In the article I read I found the following quotes:

    After installing NickLock, you can access a key switch at the front of your PC, which lets you choose between the two drives or make both drives inaccessible to the system.

    The key switch has three different positions: Left, right and middle. This picture shows the key at middle position, which causes neither of the drives to be accessible to the system, effectively creating a lock. If you switch the key to left position, it selects the drive on the left by having its cable close its master jumper.

    Although it might have been useful to include a setting that lets you choose both drives, there is probably a good reason why NickLock only allows you to select between single drives or none.

    Sure sounds to me like you can't have both drives operational at the same time.

  • I cannot count the number of newbies that kill
    their windows partition by installing linux!

    this is just supposed to make it more brainless...

  • While this is one use (*cough*), anyone storing confidential records on clients/customers should consider storing all of that information on a tray-mounted drive which is locked in a safe overnight.
  • Assuming the non-booting drive defaults to "slave" if there are no jumpers set on that drive. Of course, you knew that since the article stated it (it's in the back).
  • The last time I was in Taiwan (December 1999), almost every new computer had a removable hard drive tray.
  • Use a name, you moron... :-p

  • Re:Hmm.. (Score:4)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @06:12PM (#2187741) Homepage
    I've been hot swapping ide drives for quite some time with the cheap (US$10) drive caddies. So far I've only had one drive die and I suspect that was due to other abuse like being dropped.

    On a box with a 2.2.* kernel, I've got a small c program that reloads the ide hd info and then I can mount a drive. I use the drives for backup since they are much cheaper than any tape/tape drive combo I could find.

    The problem is the hotswap program won't work on 2.4.

    If anyone wants the program, email me but its basicly:
    exit(ioctl(fopen("/dev/hda", O_RDONLY),HDIO_SCAN_HWIF,atoi(argv[1])));
    with error checks.
  • Last time I checked, CS (cable select) was still a valid option. Put both racks on the same IDE controller and just set your enclosed HDDs to CS. Then label the outer racks as master and slave.

    How many computers support cable select? I've worked with Compaqs and HPs that use it, but will your run-of-the-mill clone assembled from parts support cable select?

  • One guy I knew used it to enforce discipline on himself. [...] one was work and one was play/

    Yup. It's the exact same setup used in research labs, except one is unclassified and one is secret. At the end of the day, you power down, pop out the classified drive, and lock it in a safe.

    Nothing new here, move along, move along... :-)

  • bay (Score:2)

    by British ( 51765 )
    I had a removable hard drive bay, with out the mentioned switch, and needless to say, I took it out.

    I could hear the hard drive power up and down over and over again for some strange reason. I had all the cables on nice and snug, but it just didn't seem to like being in a bay.
  • If the above post is a 5:Informative then I am a Knight who says Nee. It never ceases to amaze me how someone can turn the topic or focus of the post and be called Informative

    If you can get any device for $16.95 that includes $6 in parts, youhave either found a vendor who is soon to be out of business or who considers a peanut butter sandwich as fine dining. The issue was dual booting or locking drives, not transporting data, etc between machines. A fine post, but not 5:Informative.

    Have a good weekend

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @01:28PM (#2187746)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Odd I'm using RC1 of XP combined with XOSL (eXtended operating system loader) and have encountered no problems with XP.
    ------------------------------------
  • I completely agree. I've been using similar removable hard-drive carriages for years.

    They're relatively cheap and simple. Once you install the chassis, you can slip any number of hard-drive carriages into your system. This is a GREAT way to reuse old small hard-drives, to try out new OS's and such forth.

    At my house, and my father's house, we both have a few stacks of various drives lying around for different things. It beats keeping a few dozen computers around the house (which, of course, we do have anyway...)

    One note - be careful about using different brands. While they MOSTLY look similar and mostly use the same Centronics-like connector between chassis and carriage, not all brands are physically mateable. Find a brand that works well, and stick to it.
    __ __ ____ _ ______
    \ V .V / _` (_-&#60_-&#60
    .\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/

  • Stories about switches.
  • What, Tom & /. are into digs now?

    You've got to be kidding me! You think this is new stuff?! These swapout crates have been around forever (for at least a decade, if not longer)

    *YAWN*

  • Cute, but I'd rather have four jumpers, two to each drive, so I can just swap master and slave for dual boot...
  • LILO ruined my Windows partition too, but there's an easy fix! When LILO is installed, it makes a backup of whatever bytes it replaced to a file located in /boot/ .

    Read the LILO mini-HowTo, section How Can I Uninstall LILO? [linuxdoc.org].

    Of course, this will only work if you can boot into Linux with your Linux floppy boot disk. (You did create one during Linux installation, didn't you? Use Mandrake 8 next time. It actually puts LILO on the floppy.) From the console, just type in a single line from the HowTo to restore the data that LILO had overwritten.

    The problem now is that you have to use the floppy boot disk every time you want to boot into Linux. However, this isn't so bad considering you just salvaged your Windows system.

  • I think they key idea is much better, as you don't have to deal with the time and effort of physically switching drives. Even in a hot-swap setup, this is still better for the drives, as there is less of a chance of the drives getting their contact pins bent, etc. Also, it makes downtime less, as you can just select what you want instead of switching everything around and reconfiguring the BIOS every single time.
    -----------------------------------------

  • XP does not have an MBR wipe (Score:3)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @09:49PM (#2187754) Homepage
    Word is that WinXP will rewrite the MBR

    My wife signed up to test WinXP. We installed it on an expendable computer. This computer was set up to dual-boot between Win98 and Linux, with the GRUB bootloader. WinXP is not re-writing the MBR. Ever since the install GRUB comes up unchanged, Linux still boots, but choosing "windows" in GRUB now boots into XP instead of 98. This is the RC1 version of WinXP (build 2505).

    Microsoft is possibly insane enough to put in an MBR wiping "feature" but they are definitely not insane enough to put one in at the very last minute. Therefore I state with some confidence that the release version of XP won't have an MBR wipe either.

    (By the way, so far I just hate XP. Most of the changes to the user interface annoy me, and the spare computer--a 450 MHz box with a GeForce 2 and 128MB of RAM--isn't quite fast enough to run XP well.)

    steveha

  • my team uses this at work (Score:3)

    by egomaniac ( 105476 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:59PM (#2187755) Homepage
    We use swappable drive bays at work. We have a single computer with a dozen hard drives -- each one contains a different test environment (Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, WinME, Chinese, Korean, etc.)

    This is (to me) a lot better than using System Commander, as it's much easier to be 100% that your system is completely plain-vanilla and any weirdness can be directly attributed to your software. It's also a lot smaller form-factor than a room full of systems...

    --- egomaniac
  • Yes, and on the main NickLock page [nicklock.com] it says "the function of NickLock can easy be changed in the BIOS system setup to start one harddrive and still be able to reach the other."
  • You DO have access to both drives. It swaps master/slave, affecting which gets BOOTED.
  • You're right. And every linux installer I've seen in the last few years, when it sets up lilo, puts in an entry for booting to Windows. Easy as pi.

    Now, if the newbie nukes the windows partition with fdisk during the install, that's a problem. But you can't really blame that on the installer, but rather on user ignorance.

  • but a 50p switch from maplin will do the job just fine now someone's let me in on the idea :)
    .oO0Oo.
  • If you have to have an IDE cable to connect both devices and you can only select one device you can only have one of two devices on that cable working. So instead if you was using filesharing between other operating systems you have now lost that on the one IDE device that isn't selected.

    Lets say you have 5 IDE devices you want to use and your motherboard only has two IDE controllers(like most boards). With this board you limited to four IDE devices.

    With this your limited to 3 devices using one of these and 2 devices using two of these.

    If you have all your IDE devices wired up to this and from it you could select the four IDE devices you wanted to enable.This would really rock when you number of devices is greater then 4. And if you wanted you use a different device you could just boot-down change the settings on it and you wouldn't have to open up the case anymore to switch IDE devices.

    That would solve one of my problems. I do have remove hard-drives to transfer some stuff, but that ok. I would like to be able to select what device I want without having to mess with the cabling and jumpers. I used to doing that.

    First you stop putting the screws back in the case, then you stop putting the side panel back on all together. I don't leave the side panel on my main computer anymore, so I don't like others using my computer because I'm scared they'll mess with some and short something or gets splashed on the inside of the computer.

    Chad




    This is a sig.
    any questions?
  • I agree, it wouldn't be that hard, make it a 2 lead cable (like the lights and stuff on your case uses to connect to your motherboard). I've seen this in Data Express SCSI caddies, you can use it to set the SCSI ID.

  • From the NickLock website:

    (the function of NickLock can easy be changed in the BIOS system setup to start one harddrive and still be able to reach the other)

    Has this turned into Julia Child's kitchen? What is up with all these pots and kettles?

  • What would have been really nice if you could switch between which hard drive is master and which is slave from this device. That would allow you to run both drives while still being able to select which you want to boot from.

    As the article explains [tomshardware.com], they didn't include that feature due to the different jumper settings on different hard drives. It still would have been a great feature though!

  • After reading all the comments, and then finally reading the article, I finally see what it is this thing actually does, switches your jumpers between master and "not master". Now, what would be cool is if they could build these things into the already very cool removable drive bays. Basically have a switch on the front of the caddy itself to switch between master and slave.

    Remember, I said it here first, so don't try to get a patent or anything. There is a patent on the NickLock, but this probably wouldn't infringe.

  • This sad thing is...

    If these units were standard equiptment, this WOULD happen. A LOT.

    Stupid, Stupid people. . .
  • I don't need to be typing this, I just feel like doing it. Before you cop an attitude, why don't you actually pay attention to what the subject is. These's aren't removables.

    Omega9
    chown us base
  • Umm.. I think you meant the other way around. You'll have a lot better luck getting to a Windows partition from Linux then a Linux partition from Windows. Win2000 can recognize the partitions are there but can't read the data off them.

    So what program are you using to read your Linux partitions from Windows?

    Omega9
    chown us base
  • Ummm... Did you do any follow up to this or do you usually get 'very disappointed' with little effort? I read the review and noticed it didn't mention being able to access both at the same time, so on a whim I tried The Nicklock homepage [nicklock.com] for more info. At the bottom of one of the pages it says that accessing both drives is possible.

    The information is out there. Don't get disappointed because you have to look for it.

    Omega9
    chown us base
  • Then, if you want to swap the hard drive, you can turn off the computer and take the drives you want to swap, then don't forget to switch the master/slave jumpers too.

    Last time I checked, CS (cable select) was still a valid option. Put both racks on the same IDE controller and just set your enclosed HDDs to CS. Then label the outer racks as master and slave.

    Omega9
    chown us base
  • I work for a driver development group for Intel, and because of this I work on many OS's and many different configurations. We have hard-drive disk swappers on almost every machine and they work great.

    Basically you put the drive into a small case, and you pull this case in or out, replacing it with another case with another hard drive in it. This makes booting up on another hard drive extremely simple. Partitioning drives "can" work, but with win2k, windows ME, winXP, it gets too complicated, especially if your constantly breaking stuff when trying to debug a problem that causes a system crash, different hard drives simplifies the process a lot.

    As a note of warning to any novice users out there. Make sure you get one with a lock, and make sure you always power down completely before swapping drives.

  • I work for the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. We've been using swappable hard drives in one of our computer labs for about 8 months now. They were originally installed because a class needed to install and maintain windows as a project. With the swappable HD's, we could use the lab as normal and then switch to the student hard drives right before class. The swappable units appear to cause some problems though.

    That lab has a much higher rate of hard drive failure, which may be caused by lack of cooling in the plastic cases.

    Also, when machines are turned on or reset, they will occaisionally do nothing but spin the hard drive. No windows startup, no bios beep, nothing. Turning the power supply off and then back on again seems to fix the problem, but it still annoying (and most lab users don't know the fix for it).

    Swappable hard drives are a good idea, but they may be one whose time has not yet come.

    Mike
    SOIS Tech Support Specialist
    http://www.sois.uwm.edu
  • After reading the comments on this article, I think it has proved once and for all the majority of /. readers don't read the fucking article...

  • It was a SPDT switch. I connected the "pole" to the signal supply on one of the drives. Then I connected one each of the "throws" to the master/slave signal input on each drive.

  • Turbo Switch (Score:5)

    by 10.0.0.1 ( 153985 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:54PM (#2187774) Homepage
    I did a similar thing years ago with 2 525MB drives. I used the (useless) turbo switch to select master/slave on both drives, allowing me to access data on both drives in either configuration. Problem then was that the BOIS didn't auto-detect geometry information, so both drives had to be identical. Worked great, though.
  • Okay, cool idea.

    But what about those of us who dual-boot and keep MP3's and other shared files on the windows drive? Do I have to buy a third drive on which I can keep shared data?

  • I cannot count the number of newbies that kill their windows partition by installing linux!

    Is this a bug, or a feature?


    --------------------
    WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG [tetsujin.org]

  • What was your wiring configuration? All of my cases with Turbo switches just used a dinky single pole, single throw push button for Turbo.
  • Go down to Fry's and buy a couple IDE hotswap trays and install it in a spare 5.25" bay. Get some spare drives. Pretend your PC is a Nintendo and insert your cartridge (drive) of choice... BeOS, NT, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS 6.22, Darwin, QNX, WinXP, OS/2, Solaris x86, etc...

  • Hmm.. (Score:5)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:42PM (#2187779) Homepage Journal
    I dunno, I use Removable Hard Drive Trays [pcguide.com], which make more sense for me.. I not only want to be able to switch drives, but move the drives between home/office etc.. I picked up several removable trays for $20 each (canadian even!) and am quite happy with them.

    This lock switch seems overpriced at $16.95. Parts would cost you about $6 or less I imagine..

  • If my memory server me you could do this in the late 70's by haveing 2 external harddrives and just turning off the one you didnt want to use. You didnt have to move any thing and worry about a head crash.
  • Doubtful -- at least a 486.. The first machine I bought that was *mine* -- not shared with anyone else was a 486DX33 with a 210 MB HD -- top of the line at the time. No auto-detect on the BIOS either.
  • I would like to advertise my company as news on the frontpage of slashdot.

    How much does it cost, and who should I talk to?
  • Its cool that it works with drives that are inside of the case.

    When I was running a dual boot system (3 years ago or so) I was using those replaceable hard drive trays. Which work very nice if you have to move the drive to another machine, or have multiable OS's. (More then 2)


    until (succeed) try { again(); }
  • Btw, anyone know what happens when you change jumper settings when the computer is running? POP!
  • i was wondering how many posts i'd have to read until someone posted how they did the exact something years before this device was invented.

  • Not a bad idea but... (Score:4)

    by QwkHyenA ( 207573 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @01:00PM (#2187795) Homepage
    ...you're limited to two hard drives. At work and at home I use removable hard drives all the time.

    At home I use it to simplify my computer needs by having:

    A gaming system

    A linux box

    And Win2K box for days when I work at home

    At work we use them for developmental testing. All we do is slap a new clean HD into the computer. Boot it up. Run our software installation and try to crash it. Rinse and Repeat as needed.

    One problem! The removable kits AREN'T STANDARDIZED! So, if you are going to jump into removable hard drive kits, make sure you buy what you need and then some! I've run into some that won't give the HD power til it's locked, others that give power upon being inserted and worse yet....Ones that are poorly ventilated!

    All and all...Saves tons of money by not having to shell out da clams for tons of new computers (and upgrading them all once a week...)

  • I cannot count the number of newbies that kill their windows partition by installing linux!
    Blame Windows for this, not linux. There is a fairly easy fix, but it is not very well documented:
    fdisk /mbr
    This restores the master boot record to the way Windows likes it. So what you need to do is have a dos boot disk ready with fdisk on it, in case of emergency. It sucks that newbies can lose data this way, but it doesn't "kill their windows partition," they do it themselves when they use that OEM restore disk.

  • Defense against WinXP's MBR wipe (Score:3)

    by blab ( 214849 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @01:21PM (#2187798)
    Word is that WinXP will rewrite the MBR (Mater Boot Record) eachtime it is booted into. That means byebye Linux partition for those who dualboot! This might make a great defense.

    But will you go to jail if you use one as a circumvention device???

  • huh. kettle-pot. from the Install page [nicklock.com] at the website [nicklock.com]:
    Setup
    Enter Setup
    Normal use, no connection between harddisks
    In the setup chose automatic detect on your first IDE unit.
    If you like to boot from either one HDD and be able to reach the other Set also the slave to automatic.


    -------

  • Re:sheesh (Score:3)

    by hearingaid ( 216439 ) <redvision@geocities.com> on Friday July 27, 2001 @01:19PM (#2187800) Homepage

    huh. pot-kettle. from the article: [tomshardware.com]

    Although it might have been useful to include a setting that lets you choose both drives, there is probably a good reason why NickLock only allows you to select between single drives or none. For one thing, only a few drives run as slave by default if no jumper mode is set. The majority of drives run in single or master mode by default, and if you use two of them, there is no way to assign the specific drives to master or slave, thus causing a conflict.

    twerp.

  • And look how many people are under the impression that this is one of those removable hard drive gadgets! I mean, the article begins:

    The NickLock is meant to simplify the rather annoying process of changing the main hard drive. Usually, to change the hard drive you have to first open the case and change the IDE jumper settings and probably the cabling as well. The typical way around this inconvenience is to use a removable frame system, in which each hard drive that you plan to use is installed into its own frame. After shutting down the computer, the drives can be exchanged freely. However, this solution is not ideal if you have to do this frequently, since hard drives are sensitive to physical movement. In the worst-case scenario, you could cause a head crash if you remove the drive before the read/write heads have been securely parked. In a more harmless scenario, the bearings could get out of whack, resulting in a noisier drive in the idle state.

    With the NickLock, you can avoid these kinds of hazards and inconveniences.

    Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

  • Go check out the HowTo on setting up linux in the Win2K/NT OS Loader menu. I've used this several times without fail.

    Links:
    http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011. asp [littlewhitedog.com]
    http://lists.linux-india.org/lists/linux-delhi/200 105/msg00179.html [linux-india.org]
    or the handy mini-howto
    http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader .html [linuxdoc.org]

    bm :)-~

  • Did the author of that article even test the product? It seems he understands the whole concept of "master pin closed on one drive means master, open on other means slave," and he even gives diagrams of how the cables connect to the jumpers, but he still thinks the lock disables one drive!? How, by switching which HDD is master and which is slave, does one become inactive? As long as both have power and are on the same IDE chain (neither of which is affected by this device) both will be seen by any reasonably competent BIOS.

    Maybe the author is trying to indicate that the device may not work in a single-drive system, which may indeed be the case on older drives (those that won't allow a single HDD to be set to "Master" instead of "single). Maybe he knows some intricate secret of HDD setups that I've missed in many a year of buidling and fixing computers. Maybe he's just a moron, and folks should check out the NickLock website [nicklock.com] instead of reading this POS review. Guess which one I choose?

    Note: Having read the Nicklock website, it appears that it is not much better than Tom's Hardware for explanations. Yeesh.
    ---

  • Some folks are claiming that the article is correct, since the drive doesn't allow you to set the "slave" jumper. But 99% of drives out there assume that an open master jumper means slave. If a slave jumper is even present, it's just a holding place. Why use two jumpers, and thereby create a four-state system, when you only need to know on or off?

    Another thing that had been bugging me was why there were four connectors. I should have read the nicklock site closer, so that I would have found this picture [nicklock.com]. Each drive connection has two different size jumpers to accomodate different drive styles. Duh on my part.

    All in all, a cool little device. Might pick on up, even if that IS too much for those parts, since I've neither the time nor the inclination to build one myself.
    ---

  • But, this is exactly what I was saying. Most BIOS are set to AutoDetectHDD, so a master/slave switch will almost always end up in both hard drives being accessible. The article talks like that's impossible, and laments over the restriction. The NickLock website I didn't examine too closely, so it may have been more correct.
    ---
  • Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
    I light another cigarette; Learn to forget
    Well, your fingers weave some quick applets; ROTs their secret alphabets;
    DMCA gets on your ass; Wish you'd not never taught that class.



    I could do better, but it's late.

    --
  • (and the title had my hopes up)...A hard-drive controller that reads a PGP (or GPG) key into super-volatile onboard cache (maybe with enough juice in it to automatically wipe a few passes of 1's and 0's over it whenever the hard-drive loses power?) and isn't willing to read or write a byte until it gets it, but reports all geometry stuff correctly. Then, which hard-drives are on are a matter of which keys you manually load and type pass-phrases for. And, best of all, all the partitions still see each other, so you don't need to worry about windows stuff suddenly popping up on drive D: and breaking 3,000,000 registry entries that point at C:. Don't want to accidentally format a hard-drive? Simply send it a low-level command to lock. Then, take out the floppy that had your private key, and put it into a locked drawer. You're 100% safe from damaging your hard-drive, your hard-drive doesn't have to be moved around physically, and you don't need to power down to add or remove partitions. Hell, you could even have the controllers have a proprietary set of LEDs that fit into to a normal bay (y'know, so they have a visible face-plate like your cd-rom drive has, like certain SBLIVE!s, I think) and have blinkers for exactly which hard-drive is curently on and which is not. You can even have buttons below each of the available LEDs which, when pressed, drop the key as soon as the hard-drive hasn't been read or written to for 3 seconds. Most software copes just fine with having secondary storage (hard-drives) suddenly disappear, even your /swap partition, I think...certainly usually what happens when you take out a floppy while it's not writing is nothing catastrophic. Rather, you get a read error, which you can choose to fail on.
    The best parts of this are:
    1. Your controller is the one responsible for all this. All your hard-drive EVER holds is strongly encrypted bits. Way secure.
    2. Because you have your private key on several diskettes, when the LED is off indicating that you have a hard-drive "off", if you put your disk away then your hard-drive automatically cannot be accessed at all. For "secure" things this is great because you can trust that even if unsecure people use your computer, at best they can only delete the info on your hard-drive, not change it or read it. (Well, they can install keyboard sniffers and so forth, but you know what I mean).
    3. Get this: how about if the controller automagically starts backing up a hard-drive bit-for-bit whenever it's in the off mode. This just isn't possible while software has access to a hard-drive, and is possibly reading or modifying it. The most awesome backup you can have is a bit-by-bit image of each of your hard-drives. Sure it'll need a little massaging if you need to restore to a hard-drive with different geometry, but you get my point.
      The best thing is,
      any decent kernel can stay entirely in memory. If the controller has decent programmability, you can ask it to start making a backup every night at 12:00, as soon as every hard-drive has stopped being written or modified.
      If you do your scripting right, you don't even need to unmount any of your partitions! (Just make sure your system is COMPLETELY idle at the time).
    Isn't life grand?
    Of course, we are talking SCSI here. Do you call yourselves Geeks?
    "Yeah, I have a dual 1.2 gigahertz athlon".
    Oh? What's your hard-drive subsystem on that?
    "72 gigger!"
    IDE?
    "That's E-IDE to you! 5400 RPM too!"
    Sigh.

    --
  • Ever see what windoze 95/98 does to 'alien' partitions when it is installed after another OS?

    This solution keeps that crap from happening.

  • Computer Science Lab (Score:4)

    by ian_po ( 234542 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:53PM (#2187810) Journal
    Just thought I would say that the Computer Science Dept here at CU is installing some computers with these type of hard drives in them. The setup is for the operating systems class.

    Each monitor/keybord is hooked up to two computers using a switch to choose which computer you are looking at. Then you can check out a couple hard drives and schedule time on one of the computers. The idea is you can setup each of your 2 computers however you want and explore things like making your own server/client programs and so on.

    The whole thing is behind a firewall to protect from people messing with the rest of the lab. Its really weird to see a computer where you can just pull its disk right out. The bios is setup so it'll just boot of that drive. They are also thinking about putting linux on a CD-ROM so people without a hard drive can still use it to surf.

    I wish I had these when I took OS but we learned on BSD not Win2k like next semester
  • As for me, I use CompactFlash cards to quickly swap OSes. Using a simple CF->IDE socket (http://www.pcengines.com/cflash.htm [pcengines.com] for the goatse.cx weary), and a 3.5" drive bay cover plate, I fashioned somewhat of a CompactFlash card slot. A 64MB CompactFlash card holds QNX, and an 8MB holds a small Linux distribution I hacked together long ago (http://www.phatboydesigns.net/mu2-embedded-2.3.4. tar.bz2 [phatboydesigns.net]). Too bad the IDE spec does not allow you to hot-swap (not that I would with a running box).
    Sure, not as flexible, but it has plenty of coolness factor. I've also used the same Linux CompactFlash card in an mp3 player project I messed with last summer.
  • Well, you're already buying two drives for booting off of if you're using this device.
  • This seems sort of pointless to me. If your going to use two drive bays, why not have access to both drives? Lilo isn't that hard to setup!

    ___
  • The whole point about "switchable" hard drives is that you KNOW that bootable drive X is untouchable because it is sitting on your desk:

    "COMPUTER: format /dev/hdc -are you sure?"

    "USER: duh, was that turn the key left or right?"

    Even when I am as drunk as I am now, I know that the drive with all my work on it is OK, because it is unplugged and in a drawer.....

  • Been using one for years (Score:3)

    by Ulwarth ( 458420 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:54PM (#2187841) Homepage
    I've been using one of these for a few years. They are also very nice for taking your disks on the road; you can carry a drive between home and work, or whatever.

    One guy I knew used it to enforce discipline on himself. Two drives, the same OS, but one was "work" and one was "play." Play contained chat clients, games, bookmarks to recreation sites, etc. Work contained purely down-to-business stuff. One interesting side effect to this approach (I thought) was the fact that he could have a very insecure install with lots of games and buggy flash plugins and things on the "play" drive, and if it gets compromised or the drive gets munged or whatever he looses nothing important.
  • Both drives are NOT available at all times. The switch has 3 modes: 1.) Drive "1" set to master (jumper circuit closed,) drive "2" no jumper; 2.) Both drives open jumpers (i.e. no drives;) 3.) Drive "2" set to master, drive "1" no jumper. Last time I checked, and according to the article, a drive with no jumper just sits there. This is what Tom was saying in the FA when he mentioned that old drives may cause strange behavior if they are not jumpered. Sheesh!

  • porn (Score:3)

    by yellowjacket03 ( 470997 ) on Friday July 27, 2001 @12:42PM (#2187846)
    Now i can let others use my machine with my porn locked up safe.

  • There're other competing products out there... more souped up verions...

    www.sentrytech.com.sg [sentrytech.com.sg]

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