Build Your Own SATA Hard Drive Switch

Mikey Win writes "ExtremeTech shows us a cool hardware hack that allows multiple operating system to boot without dealing with any tedious BIOS setup changes. How? By building your own SATA hard drive switch. The result? You can expect a longer hard drive life span, power supply load reduction, and partitions protected from becoming overwritten or corrupted."

Re:I like it

[0racle]

I would have to say that removable disk caddies would be more low tech, less error prone, simpler, and safer to both the drive and the drives warranty.

Show me how to make or point me in the right direction to making a big red ABORT button for my computers and that's a project I can get behind.

How is this a SATA switch?

[james_shoemaker]

It's just a drive power switch. I was expecting the actual SATA connection to be switched not just the power to the various drives.

Doesn't supply 3.3v

[TheThiefMaster]

The pictures seem to be using a molex->sata power adapter, which doesn't support the 3.3v line. This means that some drives won't work with it.

Grub

[jgtg32a]

Do people really think that Grub is that hard or this just another case of because we can.

This is hardly extreme.

[rmadmin]

This is a power switch. Nothing more. Certainly not a sata switch. As much as I love soldering.. I'll stick with grub for this one. Then I can at least share my media across OSes.

these types of articles are good

[RGRistroph]

Most of the comments here are negative. The criticisms about swappable drive bays being better and that ground should not be switched are all valid.

However, I think articles like this are good. More people should actually do stuff, even if they burn out a few harddrives or power supplies in the process.

Re:I like it

[harrkev]

In general, switching this thing while the computer is running would, at least, cause massive problems for any OS that happened to be running. So this is something to be avoided in any case.

Re:I like it

[gweihir]

In general, switching this thing while the computer is running would, at least, cause massive problems for any OS that happened to be running. So this is something to be avoided in any case.

Not necessarily. If you unmount (safely remove for Windows) the running drive before swithcing it off, it is fine and just corresponds to a hot-unplug followed by a hot-plug. Doing it for a mounted drive (as, for example, the system drive) is indeed a very bad idea. For a data drive, it can make sense.