Hot Swappable Drive Bay VS. Removable Drive Bay

Hot Swappable Drive Bay VS. Removable Drive Bay

Our lives have started relying on computers more than ever in the past and the things we do without the involvement of computers are probably going to be automated soon enough. Simply thinking about our useful documents, files or even history the first thing that comes into our mind is the Hard Drive storage of our computer.

Modularity is phenomenon which allows the user to be able to move around the components between two or more PCs. This can simply be thought of as USB mice, keyboards or even Flash Drives. Before the introduction of USB, we had a technology called PS2 connectors that required restarting the computer every time you plug-in or plug-out a keyboard or a mouse.

In order to resolve this issue, thanks to the advancements, we now have what we call a hot swappable drive bay. Let’s dig deeper into what exactly a hot swappable drive bay is and how it can be extremely useful.

What is a Hot Swappable Drive Bay?

The hot swappable drive bay as the name suggests is a box that can house multiple hard drives at the same time and allow the user to pull out or swipe in a hard drive without the need for restarting the PC. The biggest advantage of doing so is to transfer large amount of data from one system to another without facing complications.

What are its Applications?

The first and the foremost advantage of using the hot swappable drive bay is portability. As mentioned above, if you want to carry a large chunk of your data from one PC to another, the hot swappable drive bay can be your best friend.

Computers have shrunk down to a very small form factor even when it comes to Industrial usage. The Mini Rugged PCs are taking over things pretty fast, coupling it up with the hot swappable drive bays can make things pretty easy and convenient.

On a larger scale, Mini Rugged PCs are being used to run server machines. Imagine a situation where you come across a faulty hard drive. Using conventional methods, you will have to bring the whole server down, try all the hard drives connected to the system on another system until the faulty is detected and only then will you be able to fire up the system. With Swappable Bay, you will not have to bring down the system at all, just pull out the faulty drive from the bay and replace it with a fresh one.

Tech companies or companies that cannot afford downtime of the system must have the Hot Swappable Drive Bay to ensure uptime and also to make sure that there is never any data loss.

Hot Swappable Drive Bay vs Removable Drive Bay

Removable Drive Bays are connected via USB connections, whereas, the Hot Swappable Drive Bay uses SATA connectors in order to connect to the system. The first advantage of the Swappable Drive Bay over a Removable Drive Bay is that of speed, the data transfer rates via SATA is way faster.

The Swappable Drive Bay doesn’t have to be disconnected from the current system and plugged into the other system, they are a part of hardware and therefore integrates better as compared to the removable drive bays.