Couple of Techy Questions

This is just an enclosure. Presumably the drives slide on their side surfaces. The door is there, to provide leverage to propel the drive out of the backplane connector.

The current trend on motherboards, is reduced numbers of PCIe slots, as well as reduced numbers of SATA ports (down from 6 to 4 ports). a new gadget has come out, an NVMe stick with 6 SATA data ports on it, but it's a bit bandwidth starved for running a softraid array. There is an Asrock chip with PCIe x2 lane interface, for the SATA ports.

Computers continue to have two video card slots, and one of the slots can be used for a RAID card or a multi-port SATA, but the selection of cards right now may not be all that wonderful.

If you have Windows 11, the SnippingTool has OCR capability, using the "text actions" button. It has virtually perfect comprehension... as long as the text consists of sentences. If random characters are present in the sample you submit, it drops back to "tesseract accuracy" and mixes up o/O/0 . I even had a 0 on a sample, with the strikethru in the character, the Tesseract-like behavior made an "oh" out of that character. But on English sentences, it's a champ.

Paul

I use these for individual drives:

Can you swap drives out while the PC's powered up?

Seems to happen quite a bit. Make sure the GPS says you got to the door, then nick the package.

If you look at the instruction booklet just readable in the third picture on that eBay page you will see that it says that the disk must not be removed while the computer is running.

Some drive bays do support swapping drives while the PC is running, and they are normally described as "hot swap".

scan.co.uk usually have quite a decent range, including some that house multiple drives ... e,g. 3 x 3.5" drives in 2 x 5.25" bays.

Many thanks for all the replies :-)

Some interesting ideas there, will think it through!

Complaining to Amazon is a bit of an art. I use the phone option. Chat doesn't work well. And I time my call for the afternoon, as that way I'll probably get someone in South Africa. I've found them to be the most helpful.

Generally speaking, the CS reps are there to put things right, and your complaint isn't about that. You got your parcel, and the CS reps are soooooo far down the pecking order that there's no way at all that they can do anything about crap delivery procedures.

Plus, it's simply not your role to give management consultancy advice to Amazon. If you don't like their deliveries, go elsewhere.

I am sure HP Z Series workstation has that option. Also Dell used to do one, but I can not remember the model.

My old (~10 years) HP/Proliant microserver has pluggable drives, but not hot-swappable, power has to be off.

That's the sort of thing I want (I already have three) but with the capacity for, say, 8 readily accessible drives.

I'm not. I am complaining about their delivery method. They deliver perishable goods nowadays and different considerations apply, I have had refunds on two which were dumped on the doorstep and so inedible.

You got your delivery, beyond that they don't care, they have no mechanism for you to make your point.

Regarding the chat transcrit, I generally find you have a chance at the end to either copy/paste it, or have it emailed to you, after that it's too late (they probably have it saved at their end, but that's for them, not for you).

They do, the chat system during which they have supplied me with an email address.

Not available, they said dur "It has been a pleasure to assist you today!

I am so sorry that your order was marked as delivered even though you did not receive it - my colleague has filed a complaint against the driver so the team can take further action. Should you like to provide further feedback please email snipped-for-privacy@amazon.co.uk.

I hope you have a lovely evening - safe travels and Merry Christmas!"

In fact as I told them several times i did receive the order, it was dumped on the doorstep with no indication, perhaps I was chatting with a bot?

I ordered some stuff and it was clkaiomed to have been delivered to the prch - which had a sliding external door.

It never arrived, Amazon promptly refunded and I reordered.

Sometimes its easier to just give the punter their money back. The delivery drivers are paid for 'marked as delivered'. They are under pressure.,

The normal delivery method now is to leave it on the doorstep, ring the bell and scarper. It helps if they take a picture, because I have more than one doorstep

I don’t know, I use them instead of dual booting etc so tend to power down, swap, power up.

They are entirely ‘dumb’ ( at least the ones I have are). Just slide for the drive and connectors, no electronics to detect one is present etc.

Here, they don't even bother to ring the doorbell. A text arrives saying it's been delivered; sometimes "handed to the customer".

You are tilting at windmills. The idea that someone would complain about receiving their delivery is so alien to the customer service rep that they didn’t even understand that’s what you were saying (possibly compounded by English being their second language and Amazon not paying them enough to care).

Perhaps, my choice.

Bloody hell Richard, you are even grumpier and cynical than me this merry Christmas!

-- “it should be clear by now to everyone that activist environmentalism (or environmental activism) is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a 'noble' idea. It is not an honest pursuit of 'sustainable development,' a matter of elementary environmental protection, or a search for rational mechanisms designed to achieve a healthy environment. Yet things do occur that make you shake your head and remind yourself that you live neither in Joseph Stalin’s Communist era, nor in the Orwellian utopia of 1984.”

Vaclav Klaus