Re: hot plugs

[Scott Carter <Scott.west.Carter@sun.com>]

> ... The other was when I was doing what Sven mentioned
> above. I was screwing (not literally :) my PCI NIC firmly
> to teh case while the system was booting (why not
> screw it in while it boots? It takes long enough, I can
> save time elsewhere I think). Anyway, the damn screw
> fell and hit some part of my *new* AOpen TX MB and it
> fried. I thought these things (the MB's) were coated,
> but it must have hit two leads from a connector or something.

That happened to me once, too.  Except, for me it was an old 8088 motherboard
back when buying one of those for $50 was a serious hit to my near-empty 
coffers.  Working on PC hardware is just horrible.  PC hardware is full of
terrible designs.  I have a friend who owns an SGI O2, and he says the parts
just sort of snap into place.  Components in Sun workstations sort of snap
into place, too.  At least the disk drives do.  Why won't the market bear 
spending an extra $50 to get a nicely designed case where everything just clamps 
into place, and you don't have to use special leveraging tricks to avoid cutting 
yourself when changing components?

I really want to come up with a design where I can just encapsulate all of the 
components of my computer with legos and just snap them together.  Ahh well.

Has anybody got experience with IDE disk enclosures?  I'm talking about the ones
that use a frame in your normal drive bay, and then your disk can plug into the 
frame with a nifty little handle.  Some of them have fans, and some of them
have special switches to cut the power to the drive.  Does that make it so that 
I can remove a disk and replace it without really disturbing the OS too much?

PS: Putting 6 of those frames in the empty 5 1/4" drive bays of my huge tower, 
and then running Linux with software raid 5, NFS, and Samba would make me a cool 
little file server.

--
Scott