Building Hot Swap Drives !!

[rat1016]

I've got a Glyph Trip case for my mixplus rig, and I need many more hard drives.There too expensive to buy from Glyph ($900). I need 18 gig Cheetah's and the hot swap case that you screw to the drive. Does anyone know where I can find these. Thank you very much!!

[drBill]

Forgive me if this is a duplicate. I think I messed up my last reply.

This is a piece of cake. A good example of how a half hour and a little backwards engineering can save you a couple thousand bucks.

Take your carrier and loosen the 4 screws on the bottom that hold the drive in place. Lift the drive partially out so that you can see the part number on the inside side of the carrier. (It's probably a Kingston DE100ICSW/B) Note the drive type on the top of the drive.

Go to:
www.dirtcheapdrives.com and check out their web store and find the type of drive you are looking for. I suggest the Cheetah ST336704LWV 36 GIG 10K drives. They sell them for $629. Comperable 18 gigs cost $349. The carriers cost $95.

Call them up and ask for Donna Montalvo. She has been very helpful to me. The service is excellent and I rarely even have to wait on hold. Actual humans answer their phones!!!

Buy the drives/carriers you need and when you get them, just hook them up the same way that you see your existing drive/carrier hooked up. Even for the mechanically/technically challenged this is a 10 minute job tops. I was dubious about it the first time, but now I will never buy a retail drive again.

After you see how easy it is, you will want to shoot the people that have sold you drive/carriers and for all intents and purposes charged you an extra $500-700 for the 5 minute convenience of dropping the drive into the carrier. If you're worried that you won't have the "Special 24 hour return" warranty, buy 2 for the price on one and keep one on the shelf in case you ever have a problem - You'll have a 5 minute replacement warranty!!

Good luck.

drBill

[Ang1970]

Just a few days ago, I was killing myself looking up parts and whatnot for exactly this purpose.
The sites I used to price were buy.com and warehouse.com
There was some mac place too, but their prices sucked.
Thanks for the new url. I'll be checking prices against that too. Tho I imagine now there won't be any more humans to answer the phones, as 20,000+ registered DUC users flood their lines.



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Angelo Quaglia
AQ Productions

[Baixo]

I, too, grow my own. takes 10 minutes!

I think whatever Glyph are smoking is affecting their collective mind. Do they really think they are doing better drive QC than Seagate, IBM etc? And what about their "special driver". It's FWB 3.0.2!

I suppose what you pay for with them is clearly superior tech support than you'd get from Seagate and the like, but it's JIVE I tell you, jive to charge that much for a loaded cannister.

[Ask Otis]

Here is what I did....

1...Kingston Data Express SCSI carrier.
DE-100I-CSW-B
(this is the hot swap carrier, single ended 16 bit, black, for use in the trip case)

Cost: $89.00 from CDW (www.cdw.com)


2...Seagate Cheetah 18 gig (st318404lw) ultra160 capable.

Cost: $399.00 from Now Micro / Pro Direct (www.nowmicro.com)

Total: $488.00 with better performance than my glyph branded 18gig cheeteh on the same system. Go figure.

I'll never buy from glyph again.

P.S. You can buy all the same components from CDW that Glyph and Roarke use. Check out the supplier for them at http://www.storcase.com/

A little work can save you alot of money!

[BDWillis]

Or… how about the DE100i-CS/B Kingston carrier from onvia.com for $66 — and the 18gig Seagate Cheetah ST318404LW drive from Megahaus.com for $349 (actually that was a phone price, even lower than was posted on the website).

And I'm sure someone can beat these prices if they work at it. Happy Christmas shopping, kids!

Warmest Regards,
Brian