:D YAY :) Congrats on the first review bro. Good job.

these things look totally badass...especially in rich's home machine....not in that beige boring case in the review.

buy them now.....now!

must....not....buy....now :D i don't have a computer i wanna switch it up with O_o so i dun need it....but it does look very cool! And if i did i'd probably buy it.

I will have to post a pic of the fully rigged machine.

NICE, got the whole techlounge white backdrop motif thing goin. If I had ne use for this thing I'd prob pick one up. Nice review

I have to echo the comments about the quality of the plastic moulding, in my case particularly the 'Active' release lever, which caused concern that the lever would snap before the door could be opened.

Having the advantage of two Cartridge Units it was evident that one [difficult to open] had a very sharp protrusion from the latching nib. This happens when the casting mould components do not mate/close properly and excess plastic material is forced out into the resulting gap.

Removal of this surplus material, by means of a couple of light strokes with some very fine wet and dry [used dry on this occasion] removed the offending material and considerably eased the door opening operation.

There are minor differences between the two Cartridges, one being the method of securing the HDD [one uses bottom holes and the other side holes] and the other is the IDE connector to the HDD. On one unit the flat ribbon is a very short version of the standard IDE connector and as reported this is slightly offset and tricky to assemble and ‘fold/nest’ as the HDD is eased into the housing. The second [and indeed subsequent third] unit this IDE ribbon has splits running along its length so that there are effectively several narrow ribbons to contend with. This modification makes it very much easier to manipulate the HDD into its final position.

The jumper leads is a brilliant idea [all the jumpers are removed beforehand], being the optimum length to permit connection whilst not being too long to tuck in safely behind the HDD, and enabling the HDD to be configured by operating the DIP Switches instead of moving the Jumpers. So once in the safety of the aluminium case the HDD can remain there. Although the instructions only cover a couple of Brands the three HDD’s in use [Seagate – Samsung – Hitachi] all use the standard configuration to set them up as Masters. If you have drives with special requirements is not Rocket Science to work out what is required, a lead plugged in and it’s DIP Switch set to ‘On’ is the equivalent of a Jumper in that position. So you simply plug in the leads where required and switch them appropriately [to save spare leads being loose these are plugged in and switched to ‘Off’].

The instructions for setting up the Temperature Monitoring and the use of the Display could be improved, but given the amount of information and only three buttons to play with everything is soon under control.

In use the Key Switch does not give any feedback and is fiddly to operate, the key will fall out in any position if let go, as the insertion distance is insufficient. It would have been preferred that the design concentrated on these items rather than the ‘security’ aspects. There is absolutely no way that the Handle when locked in the ‘On’ or ‘Off’ position [both allow key removal] would prevent all but a young child removing the drive if they were determined to do so. This would require an all metal handle and latch arrangement and increase the cost dramatically [and of course this would not prevent the whole machine being given ‘legs’ by a thief].

The review remarked that these work best in pairs but apart from mentioning that Cartridges swapped flawlessly between Racks did not expand on this. For my use being able to swap discs using spare Cartridges is a must for remote safe storage of cloned OS and Data.

Regarding price, do a good search there are widely differing prices as at 24-10-2004, also note that many suppliers do not offer spare Cartridges or if they do have silly prices.

Considering the price these are well made, I will be buying more.

A comment explaining how to 'tag' the drive as 'removable' for windows (XP/2K/etc) would be useful ;)

Are you referring to hot swapping the drives?