PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Frame/Carrier-Based Removable Hard Disk Drives

Before you buy a cartridge-based removable hard disk drive, consider instead buying a chassis that converts a standard 3.5” hard drive into a removable drive. Such products as the StorCase Data Express, shown in Figure 8-2, are available for IDE and SCSI hard drives (http://www.storcase.com/dexpress). Antec manufactures similar removable hard disk enclosures, called the DataSwap series (http://www.antec-inc.com/data_swap.html). These products comprise a drive carrier into which a standard hard drive is inserted, and a receiving frame that installs in a standard 5.25” drive bay and accepts the drive carrier. If you need to move data between systems, you can purchase additional receiving frames separately. Similarly, if you need to use multiple hard drives in one system, you can buy drive carriers separately.

Figure 8-2. StorCase Data Express DE-100 frame, with carrier partially inserted

Relative to cartridge-based drives, the chief advantages of frame/carrier removable hard disk drives are that they provide the capacity and performance of a standard hard drive because they use a standard hard drive, and that there are no special compatibility or configuration issues, again because they use standard hard drives, which are recognized as such by the computer. The disadvantage is that each “cartridge” comprises a carrier and a standard hard ...