Removable Drive Racks

Aside from the speculations about rounded cables, there are some hard data on removable drive racks. Removable drive racks are casings that can be inserted into a 5.25 drive bay and which hold a HDD inside a casing that can slide in and out the drive bay to lock into a connector in the back of the device. Even though this kind of gizmo does not allow hot swapping of HDDs, it allows removal of a drive at the turn of a key or so the manufacturers claim.

We tested several of these devices with the IBM 60GXP and the unfortunate result was that not a single drive survived in the removable rack for more than a few hours. Symptoms usually started with lagging of the system to go to the Windows splash screen after the POST. This lag continued to get progressively worse over several reboots until the drive finally was no longer recognized at all.

Interestingly, if the drive was removed from the removable racks during the initial stages of errors and hooked up to a standard UATA cable, full functionality was restored immediately. Whenever we waited until the drive was no longer recognized, switching back could not resolve the problems anymore.


A repetition of the above background appears like carrying owls to Athens but   imagine an additional interface with rerouting of the signals from the original cable to a snap-in connector and from there through an additional cable inside the "coffin" to the drive. In short, adding three additional interfaces does not appear a good idea.   Per se, though, the concept is great, though, only, don't use it with anything faster than a UATA/66 drive.