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Removeable Hard Drives

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Micom 2000

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
Messages
1,284
Location
Manitoba North of 50 degrees Latitude
Some years ago I picked up a removeable IDE hard drive cage without any documentation in a thift shop and after many attempts to install it figurred it's electonics were bad and tossed it in a box. My systems at the time were likely Win 3.1. At present it would be handy to view what's on some of my many hdds. Has anyone any experience or hints about installing them or whether there are any generic drivers available or even necessary ? There's no indication of the manufacturer on the cage.

Lawrence
 
Those things are just passthroughs in my experience. Not even sure there are electronics in it.

Is it the type with the handle and keylock in front, 40-pin IDE and 4-pin Molex connectors on the back, a large 50-pin Centronics-type plug connecting the smaller removable tray that actually holds the hard drive, which ends up back at 40-pin + 4-pin?

Definitely no drivers needed...
 
I second dreddnott. I have a "test" machine with one of those removable drive holders in a 5 1/4" floppy drive slot. I have four of the drive trays, which are loaded with different hard drives. The only one that doesn't get wiped-out on occasion is my 3.1 GB drive, loaded with MS-DOS 6.2. The drive trays or caddy don't look to have any electronics in them at all, just what looks like a Centronics connector on the outside, that is split-off inside to the normal IDE and power connectors, to connect up to the hard drive.

They come in very handy when I want to check out the lastest release of my favorite Linux or BSD distro, or if I decide I need a Windows NT or 2000 (heck, even Windows 98 ) image running, I'll put it on one of the drives.

Several years ago I tried using VMWare, running Windows NT 4 under VMWare on Linux. It worked fine, for the most part. I'm just not that keen on sharing my limited system resources between two operating systems at the same time (unless one of them is TRSDOS or CP/M, running on the Xtrs emulator!), I'd rather have the full-blown thing running in it's own computer.

Not to worry, I have a couple of "spare" computers, should I need to test more than one OS at a time! ;-)
 
There is a bit of circuitry on mine with 2 transistors and a diode and 3 resisters which might possibly contol the indicator light.

On checking it closely I found the red (5v) power wire separated from the card, DUH, which I've soldered but haven't checked to see if the thing now works.

Lawrence
 
I have quite a few removable hard drives trays (cheap plastic versions, some are for normal IDE the others are for ATA/66+ spec). The carriers work out well for swapping in and out an OS Drives.
 
Micom 2000 said:
There is a bit of circuitry on mine with 2 transistors and a diode and 3 resisters which might possibly contol the indicator light.

On checking it closely I found the red (5v) power wire separated from the card, DUH, which I've soldered but haven't checked to see if the thing now works.

Lawrence
Click to expand...
On mine, the circuitry, along with the indicator light, are in the mount, not the removable tray. I was thinking about buying a couple of more trays, but the manufacturer of my system isn't around any longer, and I'm just too lazy to verify the pin-out. I have four trays now, so I'll just stick with that.
 
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