Hot Swapable HDD Controller

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I am currently working for a company where we frequently have to remove a workstations HDD and connect it to the workrooms PC to access the drive. I have been looking for a low cost solution to not having to shut down and start up our workroom PC when connecting or disconnecting drives.

So far I have had a hard time locating a PCI hard drive controller card that supports hot swaping drives. I can locate RAID controllers that do support this, but am not sure how WindowsXP would react to having a non RAID drive connected and have some concerns about risk to the data on a drive if the controller would want to attempt to build or rebuild an array in this situation.

Does anyone know of a HDD controller that can do what I what, or some other solution that can accomplish what I need at low cost? Any advise, recommendations or feedback would be appreciated.

 

[bagg]

You could try an external USB 2.0 enclosure. Just take the drive out of the original machine and install it into the usb enclosure. That would definitely be cheaper than a hot-swappable RAID controller and for what you are needing would likely fit the bill better. Of course this is assuming the drives are SATA or IDE and not SCSI.

 

[Total]

USB.... that not a bad idea

Yep, the drives are IDE.

Thanks for the input!