What shall I do with these....

[twister]

personally i would take apart one and throw the disk at stuff,
use anther one as a internal data drive
use the last 2 for external drives with a enclosure.

[tesco]

i just unplugged the molex and plugged it in again...

but isnt that the same thing as a hdd turning on and off... :crying:

ya that's what I thoguht too.
Except that it could cause a jolt of power which could travel back through the IDE cable. Other things like that could happen.

It's possible to chagne around teh IDE cables (not on my system though, it freezes ) but you risk damaging stuff...

[clocker]

If you look closely at the power port on a SATA device you will see what makes them hot-swappable....the "+' voltage pins are shorter,so they disconnect first while the grounds are still in contact.
I suppose you could try modding a regular molex to do the same, but I can't guarantee the result.

for some reason that reminded me of clocker doing some of his crazy mods

I have always been leery of messing about with HDDs...the only successful mod I've performed was turning a giant, old Maxtor drive into an ashtray.

BTW...the visual of clocker naked in a wet bathroom makes even me queasy...

[Skiz]

can always get an external harddrive/cdrom case, which allows you to connect them via firewire or usb (depends on make/model).

Now there's an idea. *Next saturday afternoon is planned*

[SingaBoiy]

I have a PCI card that supports RAID... can I set the drives up with this as one big one?

[lynx]

I have a PCI card that supports RAID... can I set the drives up with this as one big one?

Unlikely. Although some expensive RAID controllers have this facility, most only support RAID on drives of equal size, simply because they only have options for RAID 0 (striping) or RAID 1 (mirroring).

[cpt_azad]

And don't hot swap the hard drive while in the bathtub.