Hard Drive Switching
When amongst the techy crowd, a dual boot computer (linux/windows) seems to be a pretty popular setup. I personally do not like dual boot computers, but I do like to have access to both a linux and windows computer for obvious reasons. The idea of having two OS's on one hard drive has never been something that appealed to me. Others that share my opinion like to go with the two case setup and a KVM switch. This allows them to have access to both a linux and a windows box without two monitors, keyboards, and mice. Once again I find major problems with this setup. I have one really nice Thermaltake Case. It wasn't cheap and I don't think any other pip squeak case is going to look right setting beside it, and buying another one is just out of the question. I also have space issues with this setup. So where do I go from here?I first begin to think about this when the mobo on my comp started to go bad. This comp was a beast in its day. I built it two years ago with the following specs:
512 DDR PC3200 RAM
2 80GB 7200 RPM IDE Hard Drives (160GB total)
128MB NVIDIA G-Force MX Graphics Card
2.4GHz 800 FSB processor
As you can see, this thing was the best of the best when I built it. This comp has now seen better days and I am in the process of figuring out what I want in my new comp. That’s when I decided that I must have access to windows and linux. Due to my sincere hatred of dual boot and my space issues with a dual case KVM, I am going to go with a Hard Drive Switch. This gives me the ability to switch between 4 different bootable hard drives and the drives are completely and entirely separated from each other. This will also work with Serial ATA drives due to the fact that it switches power. As you can see, this allows you to have 4 different bootable setups within one case (Me likey).
Hard drive switching technology is extremely useful and overlooked. I will give you a quick look into its full potential. Recently I was approached by some of my fellow techies on campus to help them run through ghosting issues with a dual boot (linux/windows) lab. As usual, they were having problems with this setup and their current version of Norton's Ghost was only allowing them to do direct hard drive to hard drive copies. This is a slow and agonizing process, not to mention all the problems associated with managing a dual boot lab. Let’s see how hard drive switching can solve this problem. Indus Technologies provide the equipment for this solution. You have a small IDEX in each machine that is controlled by a central switch. Each machine would have two hard drives (one with windows and the other with linux). Indus Technologies IDEX's can be used on a local level, but they can also be controlled from a Master Drive Selector. The master drive selector is connected via a daisy change with either cat 5 or DB9 to the computers in the lab. This setup can be seen below.
So once the setup is complete, the lab manager walks in and says, "I think this will be a windows lab today." He turns the key on the Master Drive Selector and BAMB! All the comps boot up in windows. He can then shut them down and turn the key to the next drive number and all the comps will boot up in linux. If the machines are booted up in windows, you can take ghost images and spread images via a network and the linux drive will never come into to play. The newest versions of Norton's ghost are fully compatible with linux and therefore you wouldn't have any problem imaging and ghosting the computer while booted up in linux mode. This allows the lab manager to manage two totally separate labs within the same lab. I like to call this "Lab Switching." As you can see, hard drive switching provides some really fascinating features.
Posted by dmac at November 4, 2004 09:11 AM
