Tech Review - Trios Multiple IDE Hard Drive Selector
Hello, again my name is Rodney Reynolds and this is yet another video review. Today, we’ll be looking at the Trios IDE hard drive selector. Let's now swing over and actually have a look at what's included with this package and how you plug in all the drives. Okay, so what you're looking at here now of course this is the unit itself and if you're going to look here there are three selections on the front for controlling three separate hard drives.
I’ll just go into what's included in this package. Of course you get the instruction manual here. You get a connector here which is the power out connector to the hard drives, three connectors for the hard drive. You also have the power in and it would go into your power supply. Of course it comes with four screws to mount this into your computer system and it also comes with ATA 66, ATA 100 cables. It comes with of course four cables.
This one plugging into your motherboard and this three would be plugged into the hard drives. Now, before I get into installing and mounting all of this into the back of this unit you have to make sure when you're doing this to have all the hard drive set to master and your BIOS has reset to auto. Let's now plug all these cables in as well as the power cables to show you how it's done. This is the back of the unit. This is the power in. This would go to your power supply and this is the power out. This would be going to the three hard drives. This is the connector for the cable that goes to your motherboard. This is the cable that goes to hard drive one, two and three.
Let me connect these cables now. First I’ll plug in the power in which is the power supply feed. Next I’ll plug in the power out which goes to the separate hard drives and next I will plug in each of these ribbon cables. That’s the one that goes to the motherboard itself. This is hard drive three, next hard drive two and lastly the hard drive one. So now that you have all your power cables plugged in correctly and you have your ribbon cables that are plugged in correctly it's time now to mount the hard drives to this and remember again this one which is the bottom one would go into your motherboard and these three go into separate hard drives.
So here we have the ribbon cables plugged into each separate hard drive. It is best I find in this situation to have the bottom one here is the hard drive one, two and three on top. And of course now you would be plugging the power cables into each of this. So here now I have all the ribbon cables plugged in and now I have all of the power cables for the hard drives plugged in. Of course you would be doing this internally inside your computer and make it functional and this of course the ribbon cable which would go to the motherboard and this one here the power cable would go to the power supply.
Now, looking at the front here of course this is where you select each hard drive and this is a very functional device. If you have for instance Windows 95 on one hard drive let's say and on the second hard drive you have Linux and the third drive you have maybe Windows 2000 or whatever else you have on there.
It gives you the option here certainly on the fly reviewing in the computer system to select which operating system or hard drive that you want to use. This also do not control power so again if you're switching this on the fly, if your operating system is on it's not going to into the power supplies is on, your system is on this is not going to damage your hard drives.
This only controls the switching of the cables on the back of the unit. And remember set your BIOS to auto and set every hard drive to a master. Also this unit will work with ATA 33, 66 and 100 drives. So if you have an older, older drive you can still use it as long as your BIOS would support that drive up to some of the latest 60 to 75 and larger gig drives. So very, very practical device if you're doing any kind of backups or if you're doing any kind of testing or if you're into a multiple operating systems, very, very easy.
You don’t have to get involved with a boot.ini file in one drive because if that drive does fail and it's the Boot.ini does fail with the multi-boot without this device you're looking at losing you know the boot sequence into the other operating systems.
So this is an independent system. Every single hard drive would have a separate operating system which makes it very reliable and very functional. I can now install this unit here into my computer system and have a look. So here is the unit actually installed into my computer system. We have a closer look, it looks quite nice. So to sum up this video review I give this product a nine out a 10, a very functional product if you are into multiple operating systems maybe Beta software, Beta operating systems and you do not want to rely upon it on boot.ini files on one drive. I would definitely recommend one of these. It's very reliable and it's very functional.
Again my name is Rodney Reynolds and this has been another video review. Be sure to check back in four days. I’ll have a brand new video review for you then. Also check out my website at www.3DGameMan.com. Until then, take care.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services