Stuart Herbert

It’s just too hot tonight to sit down and concentrate on Gentoo stuff. It’s so hot that the glue holding Kristi’s trebuchet together melted!

I ordered two hard drive caddies yesterday, and they arrived today. They’re the first parts to go into the case.

One of the important things about fitting drive caddies is being able to easily get at the screw holes on both sides of the 5.25″ drive bays, so that the caddies can be properly secured. The CoolerMaster Stacker case sides both pop off (and back on!) very easily, which is nice. As the drive caddies are for PATA IDE drives, I’ve put them down at the very bottom of the case, so that the ribbons will be as near to the motherboard’s IDE ports as possible. However, I’ve discovered that the screw holes for the bottom drive bay in the Stacker case are partially obscured by the case frame. My normal screwdriver was simply too fat to fit in the gap

The caddies themselves are a pair of StarTech Value IDE Removable Drive Drawers, model no DRW110ATABK. I deliberately bought bottom of the range - these cost me just over £10 each. And at the moment I’m in two minds about them.

It’s great that the caddies come with all the screws that you could need. Unfortunately, I found them to be quite soft, and I managed to damage the heads of every single screw just using a normal hand-held screwdriver. If I was looking to fit a lot of these quickly, using a powered screwdriver, I’d be concerned about whether the screw heads would survive.

The other problem is that I managed to break one of the enclosures the very first time I tried slotting in a caddy. The enclosures have two plastic tabs at the top. The caddy has a lever which slots under these tabs. The tabs aren’t very strong, and when I tried to close the lever with the caddy not seated firmly, the plastic level snapped the tab right off. It doesn’t look like the tabs are essential for securing the caddies in their bays (fortunately!) but we’ll have to see.

Would I order more of these caddies? Probably not. StarTech make an all-metal alternative, but I’d be concerned both about the total cost of fitting 11 of these, and the fact that they’re ATA133. It’s one thing to replace £60 worth of drive caddies when ATA133 drives disappear off the market; it’d be another thing altogether to replace £550 worth! StarTech do make a SATA I range of enclosures, but SATA II drives are starting to appear, and they don’t list a UK distributor for their top of the line aluminium version.

The only affordable alternative I could find this evening is the Icy Dock range of enclosures. They do an aluminium SATA enclosure which costs less than £20. That’s cheap enough to make it possible to write off the enclosures when SATA II becomes the common type of drive. I’m going to get a few of these caddies ordered, and see what they’re like.