my ideal setup at one time was a huge case with lots of drive bays and a switch or switches on front to choose which drives to have connected and powered-up.
i only ever got so far as to have the case and a few drives. i did ‘dual boot’ it for years, though, by simply swapping cables internally. lateral bays put the connectors close to the side panel, which itself was easy to slide on and off. it wasn’t very often, so i never got ‘motivated enough’ to get the switch for it.
i never have had an opportunity to pull or salvage a functional hot-swappable bay or enclosure and sleds. i did run across one once, but internally it was usb 2 so it got tossed on the recycle pile like the old junk it came in.
yea, i know they can be relatively inexpensive. but i saw them as a waste of money–which was and still is in short supply.
nearly everything i have as far as pc stuff was salvaged or given to me. the last things i bought myself was 24tb of hdds for media storage (when they were still ‘cheap’), replacing a literal laundry basket of small (160gb-2tb) 2.5in, 3.5in and externals that was getting to be an unmanageable mess.
my ideal setup at one time was a huge case with lots of drive bays and a switch or switches on front to choose which drives to have connected and powered-up.
i only ever got so far as to have the case and a few drives. i did ‘dual boot’ it for years, though, by simply swapping cables internally. lateral bays put the connectors close to the side panel, which itself was easy to slide on and off. it wasn’t very often, so i never got ‘motivated enough’ to get the switch for it.
i never have had an opportunity to pull or salvage a functional hot-swappable bay or enclosure and sleds. i did run across one once, but internally it was usb 2 so it got tossed on the recycle pile like the old junk it came in.
You don’t have to find any. Hot swappable bays aren’t terribly expensive.
yea, i know they can be relatively inexpensive. but i saw them as a waste of money–which was and still is in short supply.
nearly everything i have as far as pc stuff was salvaged or given to me. the last things i bought myself was 24tb of hdds for media storage (when they were still ‘cheap’), replacing a literal laundry basket of small (160gb-2tb) 2.5in, 3.5in and externals that was getting to be an unmanageable mess.
Another idea could be to connect both disks normally but have a switch on the power line of both (if you are willing to make circuits yourself)
Edit: I come up with a circuit that probably explains better what i want to do
i had thought of that, but my setup would have had more drives than ports so i needed a switch that did power and signal.
instead of all that now, i just have a literal stack of old pizzabox form factor sff and switch between entire systems.
If it works, it works XD