Externally connecting internal IDE drives

[Norm Dresner]

I have a very large and complex rack-mounted box which contains a 14-slot
ISA bus passive backplane [physically divided into 2 separate PC segments]
and 12 cards of various sorts installed. The box has physical room for
mounting 3 drives in the front opening in which I have a floppy and 2
removable HD frames for one of the PC's and I have internally mounted a
permanent HD and made a cutout in the back panel for a floppy for the second
PC in the box. Everything works well ... Until I need to attach a CDROM
drive to one of the PC's. Currently I've got the cables from the secondary
IDE controllers and a power cable hanging outside the box and I simply hang
a CDROM drive (or a temporarily needed HD) from the cables. That's ugly
and, even though it's a very low traffic area, still quite unstable and
probably unsafe as well.

SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs &
CDROMs externally?

TIA
Norm

 

[CJT]

Norm Dresner wrote:

I have a very large and complex rack-mounted box which contains a 14-slot
ISA bus passive backplane [physically divided into 2 separate PC segments]
and 12 cards of various sorts installed. The box has physical room for
mounting 3 drives in the front opening in which I have a floppy and 2
removable HD frames for one of the PC's and I have internally mounted a
permanent HD and made a cutout in the back panel for a floppy for the second
PC in the box. Everything works well ... Until I need to attach a CDROM
drive to one of the PC's. Currently I've got the cables from the secondary
IDE controllers and a power cable hanging outside the box and I simply hang
a CDROM drive (or a temporarily needed HD) from the cables. That's ugly
and, even though it's a very low traffic area, still quite unstable and
probably unsafe as well.

SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs &
CDROMs externally?

TIA
Norm

You could attach a USB, firewire, or SCSI drive.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form che...@prodigy.net.

 

[Rick Merrill]

Norm Dresner wrote:

I have a very large and complex rack-mounted box which contains a 14-slot
ISA bus passive backplane [physically divided into 2 separate PC segments]
and 12 cards of various sorts installed. The box has physical room for
mounting 3 drives in the front opening in which I have a floppy and 2
removable HD frames for one of the PC's and I have internally mounted a
permanent HD and made a cutout in the back panel for a floppy for the second
PC in the box. Everything works well ... Until I need to attach a CDROM
drive to one of the PC's. Currently I've got the cables from the secondary
IDE controllers and a power cable hanging outside the box and I simply hang
a CDROM drive (or a temporarily needed HD) from the cables. That's ugly
and, even though it's a very low traffic area, still quite unstable and
probably unsafe as well.

SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs &
CDROMs externally?

TIA
Norm

USB 2.0 is fast, hot-socketable, Win XP compatible, and the interface
from IDE to USB is pretty cheap (<$20?).