> 1) The drive bays are of the 'Lazer" brand, whilst the box > says they are hot > swappable, I have some reservations about doing this, for > fear of spiking the drive and damaging it or the others on > the machine. I know that one has to be present in the machine > for the bios to detect the fact that it is there, but there > can be vast differences between the capacities of the drives, > hence the drive parameters may not be recognised by the bios > and thence the drive might not function. Does anyone have > prior experience with this arrangement?
I have a LASER brand bay in this current workstation - the "standard" ones are most definitely NOT hot-swappable, although I have done it accidently on occasion. I believe Natcomp sell a hot-swappable IDE bay/caddy system, but it's about $80 - $00 per unit last time I looked. > 2) Assuming that it can be done how does one mount the > drive and read from > it, most likely they will be FAT16 or FAT32 - ex macroshit. FAT16 and even FAT32 shouldn't present a problem - the only format I've had problems with is TFS/HPFS. > 3) I still have a couple of old p166 boxes that I could > put these drives in > if they can't simply be plugged into the spare slot on my > present linux box, can this be rigged up as a raid array for > interface with my linux box, if so how? What, as an external disk array ? I know IBM had some sort of expasnsion chassis many MANY moons ago, but I'm unaware of anything that would do this without going to SCSI using present technology. Assuming the drives are of sufficient size to warrant the agro, why not stick them in the old P166 boxes and put a minimal Linux install on them, then mount them as NFS ? Jon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
