Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?

Patman asks: "I've recently taken a new job where I'll need to be making drive images and such for quite a few IDE drives - say a few a day. I need the ability to 'hot-swap' IDE drives into a running Linux or Windows system. The systems that I'm using are fairly standard IBM desktop PCs, I've found references on Google to IDE->USB converter cables and IDE->USB converter boxes. Does anyone have experience with those? Some come with drivers for Windows - has anyone used them under Linux? Does the mass storage USB code deal with them accurately? Barring that, does anyone have any other ideas? External hot-swapping would be ideal, although an internal solution would be doable, too."

Comments

Re:Delayed write bug in Win2k

[Spoing]

I have 2 seperate dual USB 2 and Firewire cases, and both drop files, has bus time outs, locks the bus or the whole machine...under Linux using EXT2!

This only happens on large transfers (say dd of a 5 or 20gb drive, or cp of the files). Small files or copying one a small number of files works fine. The drives I use are from Maxtor; 1 120gb, and another 40gb.

Really #@#@$ me off. If anyone has encountered this with the 2.4.22 and earlier kernels and knows a fix (even if "move to 2.6.x") I'd appreciate knowing it!

1. It can't be the drives since I've used different ones (unless Maxtors have some generic problem).

   It can't be the bus since I've used USB, USB 2, and Firewire.

   It can't be the chipset since the two cases use different chipsets from different manufactureres (and yes, I checked that they were supported before purchase).

   It can't be the machine itself since I've tried connecting it to a couple different systems (all Intel, one Celeron 1.4g desktop, another PIII 500 laptop).

   Tried formatting the drives in the external case, and reformatting them in the desktop first.