Repairing and Upgrading Your PC

Removable Hard Drive Enclosures

Frame/carrier removable hard drive enclosures are actually just modified drive bays that allow a standard hard drive mounted in a carrier assembly to be inserted and removed easily. In effect, you use a frame/carrier system to convert an internal hard drive into a removable hard drive.

The frame resides permanently in an externally accessible drive bay, and is connected permanently to power and to the ATA or SATA interface. The carrier assembly contains power and data cables, which remain permanently attached to the hard drive. The rear of the carrier assembly contains a custom connector that routes power and data signals from the PC through the frame and carrier to the hard drive. The connector that mates the carrier to the frame is designed for durability, and is typically rated for thousands of insertions and removals.

These devices are simply physical modifications that allow internal hard drives to be inserted and removed easily. The computer sees the drive as just another hard drive because it is just another hard drive. Frame/carrier assemblies are available for any hard disk interface, including PATA and SATA. More sophisticated units support such functions as hot-swapping, sparing, and RAID, if your host adapter, drivers, and operating system also support those functions.

Figure 9-4 shows three components of the StorCase (http://www.storcase.com) DE-100 frame/carrier system. The assembly at the top is a frame with an empty carrier partially ...