Removable Hard Drive?

[Hymer]

No, you're not "missing" anything. As I recall you're working with

PATA HDDs and they're not designed to be "hot-swappable"
(hot-pluggable) nothwithstanding the fact they're functioning as
removable hard drives in a mobile rack. There have been some
software programs in the past supposedly designed to create this
capability for removable PATA HDDs but we never found them to be
reliable and haven't worked with them in years.

BTW, there is a real & present danger of a "loss or corruption of
data" problem when connecting/disconnecting PATA HDDs to & from a
running system. I would be very cautious about this if I were you.
We have even received reports from a few users that their drives
became defective as a result, however, we've never experienced
*that* particular problem - at least none that I can remember.

On the other hand, SATA HDDs *are* (for the most part) designed to
be "hot swappable" - "hot-pluggable" assuming that capability is
present in the drive itself, e.g., SATA-II drives, as well as
supported by the motherboard. So that's another significant
advantage to using removable HDDs (SATA) in that you can use a
secondary SATA removable HDD just like a USB external HDD -
connecting/disconnecting to & from a running system - but with the
added advantage that the operating system will treat the SATA HDD as
an *internal* HDD (should it contain the OS it will be bootable).
Anna

Hi Anna,

Thanks for the great explanation. You are right about my drives being
PATA. I did put a Ghost clone of my C drive on an old drive that I had
around as a second backup. This is in addition to a USB External Drive
that I use for regular backups.

My next machine will be SATA II but this is an older Athlon 3200.

Thanks for the info,

Bob