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Tale of Two Hard DisksA
Tale of Two Hard Disksby Garfield Lucas
If you have lots of high-resolution images stored on your PC chances are you're running out of hard disk space. Those who have attended any of my courses recently will be aware of our ongoing experiments with large but affordable removable hard disk solutions to our massive file storage needs. You may ask, why not just carry on using recordable CD? After all they're cheap (upwards of 25p each) and the drives are available for upwards of £40.
Trouble is that CD's only store around 650MB of data. In our experience, CD is a great archiving and distribution medium. But it is not always convenient for day-to-day storage or back-up - unless you use the more expensive (£2.00 each) rewritable CD's - and run the risk that some CD drives won't read them - and don't mind continually swapping CD's if your image library is larger than 650 MB!
The rapidly growing array of removable hard disk enclosures really does present new and interesting alternative to CD, particularly for the storage and retrieval of clinical slides on a day-to-day basis. At Highcroft, circumstances have forced us to examine two quite different removable hard disk shells…
Amacom FlipDisk shell, ready to assemble with IBM TravelStar 32
GB hard disk.
Initially the FlipDisk appeared a dream come true. Once we persuaded Amacom to sell us just the FlipDisk shells, so we could install our own laptop hard drives, we believed we had a robust, convenient, affordable and highly portable solution to our image storage needs. FlipDisks could be assembled in a few minutes, and seemed the perfect container for a variety of laptop-sized hard disks, including IBM's capacious TravelStar series. Then we hit a few snags.
Firstly, the PCMCIA 'flippers' that hinge out from the device and plug into the CardBus slots in our laptop PC's started to develop problems…
'No worries!' thought I, as I ordered some USB leads to connect to my laptop's USB port. Initially these appeared to work fine. Then we discovered that after a random length of time, Windows seems unable to communicate correctly with the USB attached FlipDisk device. This is a major problem if it occurs whilst writing data to the disk. Whilst the explorer continues to show the drive letter, folders and files on the drive become inaccessible. Eventually the disk becomes unreadable and your data is lost forever!
On 2001-05-31 we submitted a detailed five-page report to Amacom, London detailing our woes. Sadly, as yet we still have not had a written response, and no advice on how we may resolve our problems. However Amacom is now supplying us with spare 'flippers' in advance, so we can at least repair the devices our selves.
Assembled FlipDisk connected using built-in 'flipper' to laptop
PC via PCMCIA.
With thousands of image files needing a safe home we needed a 'quick and dirty' alternative that we could deploy while we resolved our difficulties with the Amacom product. Enter SSI removable hard disk bays. Now, these are far from sophisticated devices. The cartridge - the bit that contains the hard disk - consists of a great lump of die-cast aluminium with a pressed steel top and bottom cover, a handle at one end and a really big socket at the other. The frame is also big and chunky and fits in a standard 130mm (5.25") bay on a desktop PC. It has a small and rather noisy cooling fan built-in which seems very effective at keeping even the largest hard drive cool
.
SSI hard disk cartridge fitted with 76GB IBM DeskStar hard
disk.
The IDE type we chose can't be hot-swapped, but they do take the much larger, but less expensive 100mm(3.5") hard disks, currently available up to 76GB.
Since first installing the cheap-and-cheerful SSI solution back in June 2000, many of our FlipDisks have fallen into disuse and we have no plans to purchase any more. Meanwhile all our new graphics orientated PC's & servers have an SSI removable bay. We connect our laptops to these desktop machines via a network connection when we need to access files. Whilst this is not as convenient as connecting a FlipDisk directly to a laptop, it is infinitely more reliable.
If your data is valuable to you, then reliability of the device upon which you choose to store it has to be your overriding concern. If the reliable device is also more cost effective, then the less reliable device will quickly find itself discarded, regardless of how convenient or nicely designed it is.
Page last updated by Garfield Lucas on 2001 September 23