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Build Your Own SATA Hard Drive Switch

Posted by timothy on from the there-can-be-only-one dept.

Mikey Win writes "ExtremeTech shows us a cool hardware hack that allows multiple operating system to boot without dealing with any tedious BIOS setup changes. How? By building your own SATA hard drive switch. The result? You can expect a longer hard drive life span, power supply load reduction, and partitions protected from becoming overwritten or corrupted."

2 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is this a SATA switch? by gabebear · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was excited about building an active SATA multiplexer... but this is just dumb. I did something similar a long time ago with IDE drives; instead of powering one drive down I had the switch attached to jumper positions so that the switch controlled master/slave.

    Sata Hub (but not a switch)-> http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html

  2. Re:How is this a SATA switch? by Fourier · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've helped to guide a bunch of SATA boards from prototype to product. From personal experience, I can tell you that a switch put together "half-decently" is very likely to result in unreliable SATA communication.