Felt that this would need to go in General, as it's not particularly linux-specific.

Has anyone here got any experience with HD racks/caddies like this? I'm going to be working towards Linux certification (initially the Linux+), so I could do with lots of experience of installing and configuring different flavours (including doing the kind of things that are likely to break the installations). I was wondering about getting one of these, so that I can easily swap out my current HD for a spare one and not put my working distro at risk.

Rob

I run nearly the exact same thing. Works like a charm. You may not want to include it in your fstab (since the mounting parameters can be different from one drive to another). But it works great.

The price seems a little high. The one I bought at geeks dot com is less than half that price.

Yep, I have about 10 of them. Two for my operating systems and the rest for carrying and archieving files. They are very reliable.

Thanks for the answers. Would they be reliable enough for holding my main disk, with my working distro installed? So long as I don't drop it when it's out of the rack, that is.

Rob

They are as reliable as the ide cable connecting them. Don't worry. I've used them for years. And I use harddrive massively. I record about 5gigs a week and carry them home, never had any problems.

Agreed, no need to worry about your main drive/distro. This will work great as a distro playground.

Where I work we get many forensic copies of drives. After a case settles or goes inactive, I inherit the discs cheap or free. I have stacks of them. If a distro piques my interest, I'll throw in a blank hard drive, install and play around. A great luxury to have a drive you can afford to lose.

But this never compromises my main distro's boot drive (as long as I'm careful). Eating cake.

I've used them before, they work well. I do the same with my laptop now with a spare drive tray I got on ebay and the original 20G drive it shipped with setup with the same dual boot I have now just each partition is smaller so its a good test system.
Another option is to buy one big drive then download vmware player and resinatll some of their example machines and run your test distros under that. I'm doing that now, if I need a windows system to test with I have am XP, 2000 server and 2003 server under virtual machines.