Mutiple Independent Hard Disks

thforjason

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
13
0
18,510
I was told that there is a piece of hardware mounted in the 5-inch drive bay where multiple physical hard disks can be attached to it via the IDE connectors. In turn, the device is connected to an IDE connector on the motherboard. The front faceplate of this device has multiple buttons, each for one of the hard disks. The point of using this device is to have a "multi-boot" computer without having to worry about the problems associated with the multiboot setup such as a corrupted MBR. Basically each hard disk runs its own unshared OS.

Can someone tell me if this product exists and where can I buy it?

I also heard I can use PartitionMagic special boot utility to do basically the same thing with multiple physical hard disks. Is that true? If it is, is it better than the aforementioned device?
 

Zlash

Distinguished
Feb 5, 2002
955
0
18,980
I don't see why you just can't run them in the machine like normal with a boot manager =).

<font color=red>:</font color=red> <font color=white>:</font color=white> <font color=blue>:</font color=blue>
 

Ncogneto

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
2,355
53
19,870
Yes it does exist, try office max or office depot can't remember exactly which one it was that carried them.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!
 

Lars_Coleman

Distinguished
Feb 9, 2001
1,020
0
19,280
Try this ::: <A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=02-101-001-01.JPG/02-101-001-02.JPG/02-101-001-03.JPG/02-101-001-04.JPG/02-101-001-05.JPG" target="_new">Romtec Trios</A>

Also if you use a boot manager it may be built into the OS as long as you dual booting with NT, 2000, or XP.

<font color=red>People and hard drives are like bandwagon fans and sports!</font color=red>
 

unoc

Distinguished
Mar 5, 2002
280
0
18,780
You don't need this device because quite all BIOS today allows you to set as boot disk one of the four IDE drive. Moreover, installing a SCSI adapter or a Promise (or Highpoint...) controller you have one more bootable drive. That means you can have up to five different (?????) OS to boot your computer without adding any device. Each OS stays on a physical HDD without being influenced by the other OS and each OS may see all the other HD drives because your are not excluding any drive.