I have a large pc, the case has a large cage for 4 full size drives (cd type), it contains 1 cd drive and I'd like to also put in it 3 hot plug hard disk drives (so-called RAID-edition) in the free space for a RAID 1 (2 drives) plus 1 spare to be used automatically in case the array fails.
This cage is designed so that the cd drive can slide out from the front after pressing inward a spring clip attached on each side of the drive.

Question 1: can anyone tell me what piece or pieces of hardware I should purchase to accomplish this.

Question 2: will a 3ware 8000 or 9000 type RAID card with 4 slots (I could not see a board with 3 slots) be suitable for the job?

The board of this pc is an ASUS A7V600-X (PCI), it has raid but I prefer the hardware solution.

Thank you for your help.

Any of the hardware raid cards should work, even if it has more slots than you need. But hot-plugging will require "extra" hardware. You can't just put the drives in a normal PC enclosure and "yank" the cables out of a drive. Look into external drive enclosures designed for this.

Cheers.

The 3ware card would be a good choice.. One of the best supported cards for Linux.

You can purchase an internal hot swap drive cage to go in that case..

http://www.scsi4me.com/sata-serial-a...nal-cages.html

This unit may be perfect.
Reasonably priced, requires 3 - 5.25" Bays to install, and can hold 4 SATA drives for hot swapping.


Or this S23 model requires 2 - 5.25:" bays and has 3 Hot swap trays..

Thank you all for the answers.

Neat. Wish I'd know about those cages about 2 months ago, when I re-built my server, with RAID.

Cheers.