Hot swap drive bay for SATA III

[rickoxo]

I am getting ready to build a machine and one thing I would love to be able to do is swap hard drives in and out. The main system drive will be fixed, but I 'd like to be able to hot swap drives for copying, backing up and alternative boots.

I've seen a few options on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/KingWin-Multi-Function-Components-Other-KF-253-BK/dp/B00856XFUS/ref=pd_cp_e_3) but none of them say they are SATA III compatible. The one listed above has the bonus of having two USB 3.0 ports on the front of the case, which would be nice.

Anyone know of a swappable drive tray that works for SATA III?

Thanks, Rick

 

[BitterMelon]

Would you honestly need SATA3? I assume you are going to use regular HDDs, and not SSDs. Then there is really no big reason why you can't just run SATA2 instead.

 

[DBP]

Did they significantly update the cable specification between SATA2 and SATA3? Because really the dock is just a fancy cable that's connecting the drives to the controller. So if you have a SATA3 drive connected to a SATA3 controller via the dock I would expect it to work at SATA3 speeds (falling back to SATA2 if either of them are SATA2). But as BitterMelon mentioned, you won't notice the difference in throughput unless you're docking SSDs.

Note that the Marvell controllers (which can be put into "hotswap" mode via Multibeast) on some of the GA-Z77 boards are SATA3 controllers.

 

[BitterMelon]

Did they significantly update the cable specification between SATA2 and SATA3? Because really the dock is just a fancy cable that's connecting the drives to the controller. So if you have a SATA3 drive connected to a SATA3 controller via the dock I would expect it to work at SATA3 speeds (falling back to SATA2 if either of them are SATA2). But as BitterMelon mentioned, you won't notice the difference in throughput unless you're docking SSDs.

No, any old SATA cable should work with SATA3. So yeah, it it's just a physical adapter, it should work with SATA3 too. But YMMV it seems, I know some people who have had problems getting SATA3 to run with older cables. The same might apply to the hot swap bays.

 

[rickoxo]

So if I have a new drive that can do 6bg/s transfer and the motherboard has 6gb/s controllers, I could use either a SATA II or SATA III connector and it wouldn't matter?

Are you saying that the 6 gb/s connector from the motherboard will fit just like a SATA II connector and fit into any generic hot swap drive bay?

if that's the case, that's great, but that sure sounds odd ...

 

[DBP]

Yes. The connectors are the same. As long as the physical dock connection is high-enough quality and doesn't introduce errors at the higher speed, you'll be golden. Most SATA->SATA docks like this don't mention much more than "SATA" (without specifying a speed).

In fact, that King-Win dock you linked to at Amazon: if you go to the product page at King-Win you'll see they actually mention SATA-III. So presumably the connections are up to scratch.