Crazy Raid 1 question

OK...I have a phone system that runs 2 Fujitsu 40gb notebook drives tied together in a Raid-1 array. It is designed to fail-over to the sceondary drive if the primary fail automatically. I have no access to the programming or formatting of this array, that's just how it is.

What I want to do is extend the secondary drive external of the system to replace the secondary drive every day with a rotation of drives for data protection. I want to do this because of the mirroring. I've had a history of getting something corrupt in the primary drive and it just mirroring to the secondary immediately, basically ruining both drives with no chance of recovery. This array is designed to protect against physical failure, not data corruption. Also, the drives are not hot swappable.

What I want to know is if the 44 pin ATA/IDE cable can be tapped into to wire a loopback switch so that the system does not realized the drive is missing.

I know pins 3 through 18 are for data throughput, there are several ground wires, and 41-44 supply power, but there are a couple of pins, like 27 and 31, are signaling from the drive to the system. Could a DPDT switch loop a few pins together to fool the system long enough to pull the drive and replace it?

Any ideas or maybe any other suggetions?

Ron

With the drives not hot-swappable, the phone system would have to be taken out of service to make the swap. It's a 24/7 operation with several hundred users, so the downtime is not an option. I can pull the drive out without causing problems, but once it is re-inserted, it does not come back online until the system is power cycled, which is what I'm trying to avoid.