by yoonman
WhiningDog.NET
12/29/02

1. Introduction

Did you ever wish you could bring home that 5GB of mp3s you downloaded at work without having to burn several CDs? Do you desire to switch from Linux to Windows by merely swapping drives in less than minute? Enhance Technology, a storage specialist, was nice enough to send WhiningDog the “2 Bays Internal IDE Hot Swap Storage Subsystem” to help solve these pressing problems. Swap system is marketed as a cool, hot swap, raid supported system. However, I do not own a raid controller card, so for the purpose of this review I will focus on ease of use, installation, and applicability to the home tech enthusiast.

2. Overview

The swap system fits into two 5.25” drive bays and holds a total of 2 - 3.5” hard drives. The swap system supports the latest in drive technology including Ultra ATA133 support as well as providing two independent channels which are compatible with the majority of RAID manufacturers. The system supports 3 temperature gauges and includes a rather large fan to ensure optimal operating temperatures.

3. Packaging and contents

The swap system is well packaged in a durable foam enclosure. The system comes with 2 ATA 100 IDE cables, screws, and 2 drive carriers. The drive is mostly made of aluminum with the exception of the plastic front making the total weight of the system extremely light as well as optimal for heat dissipation. Aesthetically, the beige color of the system matched well with my overall system, I also believe Enhance Technology makes this product in black as well.

IDE ISWAP Box	and it's contents

Rear Fan	Drive Carriers

4. Setup and Installation

The swap system fit easily into the two, 5.25” empty slots of my standard flair case. I screwed down the system and was ready to install my two hard drives into each of the drive carriers. The process is as easy as installing any hard drive, just connect the IDE cable, power cord, and screw down the HD to the carrier and you are all set to go. The only snag that I encountered was when I could not slide the carriers into the system because I did not use the flat headed screws to secure the HDs, so be sure to use them. Also be sure that the excess IDE cable is securely within the carrier and not popping out, because this will hinder sliding the drive into the carrier as well. Nonetheless, these are extremely minor issues. The whole process took me less than 10 minutes and this is my first swap drive ever!

4.1 Other installation notes and comments

Once you have the HD installed in the carriers be sure to push them all they way into the subsystem before closing the blue hatch. It would have been nice if the blue hatch was unable to close unless the drive was completely pushed into the system, but again this is an extremely minor issue.

Housing Assembly Installed	Drive Carrier inserted

5. Use and testing

Once all the carriers were securely placed into the system I powered the box and went straight to the bios. <picture>
Great both drives were instantly identified without even the motherboards knowledge of the swap system. I booted up windows and opened up windows explorer. Both drives were identified and I copied, deleted and moved files between them. Everything seemed silky smooth. Since the system was advertised as a Hot Swap system I pulled the secondary drive out while the system was still running to see what happened. To my delight, the system was still running and stable however windows continued to think the drive still existed. For kicks, I tried copying a file to that non-existing drive and as expected windows hung for a bit and I was forced to kill windows explorer. Afterwards I put the secondary drive back in and tried moving, deleting, and copying files between drives again, and as expected all was successful and well. This is pretty cool, so basically I could have pulled the second drive out brought it to work copied all of my relevant files and then brought it back to my home system and worked from there without ever having to power down the system. Obviously, in a server type environment this is more relevant since you want minimal downtime in a business oriented environment. Flungster goes into better detail for more uses in his 4 bay review, but for the average user like me this setup is pretty kick ass.

6. Conclusions

The 2 bay IDE Swap system was an extremely easy product to install and get up and running. Swapping hard drives in and out was very simple and worked seamlessly into my system setup. The rear fan and aluminum carriers ensure maximum cooling and stability. In addition the power to swap drives on the fly was an extremely cool feature that anyone maintaining a server environment would definitely appreciate.
Although this is my first experience with a swap system, I would definitely recommend this product to anyone interested in setting up a swap system.

We'd like to thank Enhance Technology for sending us this review sample.

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