HDD hot-plug enclosure with programmatic eject mechanism

[ktorn1]

Hi all,

First of all I find it hard to believe that this will be my first post on a forum/website which I remember first reading back in the 90s!

In the next few months I will be working to build a small personal server for storing very personal data (like lifelogging activities) and one of my key requirements is that it is really easy to use and maintain.

Changing a hard-disk on a NAS-like device is still rather difficult for non-technical users, so I was thinking about adding a layer of software to the disk-replacing process (like a wizard).

For this to really work it would be ideal if I can programatically eject a faulty hard-disk on a hot-swap enclosure, making it obvious which disk needs to be pulled from the enclosure.

Is there *anything* like this kind of enclosure, where drives can be ejected "a la cd-rom"?

Best Regards

DFF

 

[ss202sl]

The easiest thing I've seen is indicator lights on each drive showing if it's good or not. If you can't figure out to replace the drive with the red or amber light(instead of green) you shouldn't be replacing a drive. You're also asking to install a mechanical ejection device on each drive that will be used only a couple of times throughout the life of the machine, so how much money will this add?

 

[ktorn1]

@ss202sl

Yes, indicator lights would be helpful in many cases, but I'd like to take it a step further and make it impossible for a user to mess things up by removing the wrong disk. In fact, removing a disk that the OS did not explicitly eject should be impossible, therefore also adding an extra security component to the system.

Regarding cost, for sure it would add extra cost. However I'd expect it to be negligible in relation to the whole cost of the system, especially when the production of similar mechanisms have been around for a while. I should add that I was thinking of the spring-loaded drives found on notebooks (the ones that just snap open when ejected), and not the motor-driven ones found in desktops.

I wouldn't rule out designing my own hot-swap enclosure to achieve this goal, but I'd much rather re-use an existing solution if possible.

DFF

 

[popatim]

An interesting idea but How are you planning to spin down the platters and then park the heads before ejecting?

 

[ktorn1]

An interesting idea but How are you planning to spin down the platters and then park the heads before ejecting?

That is a very good question, and hopefully the usual power management methods employed by operating systems can be applied in this scenario.

I don't know much about the Windows API, but in Linux you can control things like HDD spin-down using 'hdparm' and 'echo 1 > /sys/block/<dev>/device/delete'.

It can be argued that in my main use case, replacing faulty HDDs, this feature is not really necessary, but it is still very userful for other instances where you want to eject healthy disks (say, upgrading the size of the array).

 

[ktorn1]

Looks like there isn't anything like what I described out there.