Bah, humbug!

[unixronin]

I would just like to take a moment to observe again that I HATE, HATE, HATE traditional PC four-pin Molex power connectors.

More explicitly, hot-swappable devices aren't, when you inadvertently fumble the power connector because the pins on the infernal Molex aren't properly shielded and can make connection when not properly aligned yet.

However, now the Plextor CDROM drive is back on the bus again.  Maybe the now-disconnected Zip drive¹ (which I removed while the machine was powered down) was malfing badly enough to knock it off the bus (which wouldn't surprise me, SCSI on the Zip has always been unreliable — not least its internal termination, which is utterly worthless).

[1]  No, I wasn't trying to hot-swap the Zip out.  I was hot-swapping a replacement disk in, and would have been fine if I hadn't fumbled the infernal Molex.

Comments

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Yeeks! I've never even tried to hot-swap a Molex.

Took me a while to figure out WHAT kind of plug you were referring to - I was running through the list that WAS hot-swappable. :)

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Don't rackmounts have power in the caddy that also has the data connector?

Also, I just replaced the hard disk in my notebook, and the caddy with integrated power+data looks neat. The new 7200rpm hard disk uses less power than my old 4200rpm one, has twice the data rate according to hdparm, and is twice as large for $80.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Yes, Molex sucks. Get SAS/SATA gear instead. Or consider some of the interesting (but well designed) Taiwanese hot-swap IDE bays that are on the market in the last few years (assuming you can find a hotswap-capable IDE controller, 3ware is the only one I know of).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The machine in question currently uses all SCSI devices. (All but two of them SCSI-III, at that.) I don't particularly wish to totally replace the entire disk subsystem just yet, either with SAS or SATA, and certainly not with IDE.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Ok, then how about using some U2W to SCA adapters, to get SCA drives in there nicely?