Gordon Woolf's Blog

A quick change for hard drives

All the drives on my main PC are removable and with the SATA drives particularly it has struck me how simple it is to put an actual drive into the tray. Once, because I took a drive out of the tray to more safely drop a spot of oil on to the tiny fan within the tray and dropping on a little too much, I swapped the drive to another tray and because it was a snug fit I did not even bother to add the screws as I'd soon be putting it back in the tray it came from. Digressing: the advice I got to lubricate the fan was critical. They soon get noisy if you do not and I wonder how long the fan would then last. Now I've taken drive swapping a stage further. On the Zazz site in early March there was a "hard drive docking unit" for around $30. It is a small black box with a slot in the top that in turn has a a spring-loaded door with a small rectangular hole in one corner. At that corner in the bottom of the slot are the drive connectors. The small slot guides a 2.5-inch drive onto the connectors, and the spring loaded door opens to guide in a 3.5-inch drive. There's a USB connector and a small power plug to give it a 12v supply. To connect another hard drive just plug in the unit and slot in a drive. There's a single black button which when pressed forces the drive up off the connectors. So, as the box states, it takes 2 seconds to add or swap a hard drive (of course if it is not formatted it can then take you a while via Disk Manager to get it ready to use.) It is actually quicker and easier than putting in a DVD. Of course, since finding out these things existed I've found similar things on the Internet which will work for IDE drives too, but they have the problem that without an adapter the power is not as easy to connect. With a SATA drive the power goes in via the set of connectors also used for data. The IDE-capable ones tend to look more like USB docks but with longer slots but the molex connectors remain the problem and the IDE and combo dock makers seem to also offer molex removal tools. One also offers a neat miniature suitcase with adapters for just about every kind of drive including those from iPods. Lots of pics of one similar to the one I've got are at http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=524 though mine is unbranded. The unit works with Mac and Linux too, provided the drives you put in it are compatible.

Is that site really down?

Can't get a website, then another one fails, bringing up a message that your browser can't find the server? Yes it happens, and mostly you'll just think Google, or wherever the link came from, is out of date and you move on. It recently happened to me but the site was mine, hosted on a server in Virginia and I had not received an SMS to tell me the server was down (which is a service I pay for). When I went to the site of the service which tells me whether my server is working, it was also unavailable, and that was the clue to what was happening. Most other sites I tried came up with no problems. So I phone one of the firms whose sites I host and all was OK for them, at that time, but some hours later when my sites are working I get a call from that firm to say their sites are down. But I'm getting them OK. It takes me a while but I track it to one of the dozen or so companies which provide the Internet backbone worldwide. One company's connections were on and off for periods of up to an hour. ISPs buy their Internet connections from more than one supplier (or at least all the good ones do) but many who have two suppliers would not buy enough from each to carry their whole load if the other goes down. Some requests will be met from the ISPs own cache so if a site is static you might not know that the connection is down. If anyone can be said to own the Internet it is the Tier 1 suppliers. They are the firms who get paid for the cable traffic they are providing to smaller providers, though they do swap their interconnected services among themselves, known as peering. The Tier 1 providers are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT (formerly Verio), Qwest, Savvis (formerly C&W, Cable & Wireless) and Sprint. In the sense of their importance related to this part of the world, i.e. Australia, Telstra and SingTel (which owns Optus) are well down the tree and buy their connections for much of the world from the Tier 1 companies. Most Tier 1 suppliers are owned in the US but NTT is part owned by the Japanese Government and Global Crossing is based in Bermuda. Cogent, used by many Australian ISPs, and a contender for Tier 1 status, uses Verio for many of its worldwide connections. Problems with the Internet backbone are not common, but they do happen.