Multi Booting 4 Operating Systems with the ICY DOCK flexiDOCK MB524SP-B 5.25" Drive Bay
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- Опубликовано: 3 авг 2017
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Nice. Treating SSDs like audio cassettes for an old car stereo. Like it!
That's a great analogy :)
Outtheredude I prefer to think about it as game cartridges. And I actually wanted to do a project like this, I just need *many* SATA laptop drives :)
This is actually really cool. I could see this being super useful in a retro gaming PC. Just load up whatever OS + appropriate games and your off. Awesome video Phil.
I would think the power buttons being recessed is sort of a positive. Having they easy to bump would not be good either.
That is a good point.
Yea, I was gonna say that it's most likely a safety feature.
In the old days you'd solve that problem with a barrel lock and key method. ;) But I guess this is adequate too.
I used to have something like this, but it was a hard drive dock and caddy system I bought from CompUSA all those years back. Quite handy when you just wanted to have multiple OSes on the same system without having to deal with a buggy or incompatible boot loader and just wanted to straightforwardly boot without any BS in the way.
IcyDock has always done very nice HD cases, I remember the time when modding an Antec 900 was the way to go for a cheap home made NAS with 3 icy dock bays could fit HD vertically ... I clearly don't regret that time now that we have amazing cases such as Fractal R(Insert Number) but it was a really nice device.
Thanks Phil very useful tool. I have an old IDE single drive setup. This would make a nice upgrade
Very cool. I always wanted something like that for a diagnostic bench machine.
With something like this, I could theoretically run a PC with Windows XP, 7 and 10, and a version of Linux.
You can do this already with GRUB, but this just lets you shut every other drive off and not have to fuss about with that.
Absolutely my thought.
Nice for benchmarking. Each system runs on an identical drive and changing OS is easy.
much cheaper just to use grub
I normally have a second ssd for multibooting different os's & use grub. I never touch my main windows ssd though aha I dont want to mess anything up.
I have a hot swappable 3.5" bay in my computer and hard disks labeled different distros of Linux and Windows Insider preview. I just have to get the drive one in and choose boot device.
To prevent messing up EFI partitions on my primary drive, I'll setup each system in a VM and boot to it once it is done. It also allows me to install and configure nvidia drivers on linux before booting into a black screen
Looks like this would be useful to anyone wanting to build a Hackintosh, but doesn't want to give up using Windows in the process.
OK I really like this product. The flexibility is great, and for older cases that don't have SSD mounts it's a great option.
I've had three of IcyDock's 5x3.5"-in-3x5.25" hotswap bays for eight years, and I've generally been quite happy with them. One major criticism that I've had is that their older products used proprietary fans (the fan was permanently installed into a custom enclosure with a custom connector), so when you have a fan failure (I've had two fans fail) you need to get a replacement from the manufacturer at a significant expense. They've solved this complaint in their newer units, as you can see in the unit you reviewed, by switching to standard fans that are much easier to find replacements for.
One thing I'd like to see in the product you reviewed is a door over each slot. It doesn't need to have a tray, but just having a door that closes would be nice.
this would actually be handy for those who do try and recover data from laptop harddrives that are gonna fail which ive been a victim to that more than once
This is so cool. I am totally doing this someday with my Linux dual boot, totally unnecessary, but really cool.
I've got a single bay dock with adapter for 2.5" drives so could certainly use one of these in my spare drive slot.
This is more convenient than software multibooting. Awesome!!!
All of a sudden everyone in the comments is a computer expert. O that's right.. They really are. Love this channel!
I love this thing... Due to work opportunities, I have been accumulated quite a spread of 2.5" drives... 1TB and up... I've had ideas for them, and some will end up in laptops, maybe one or two will end up in a PC internally... But this, this is perfect for the remainder... Then I can essentially have 1TB and up disks, HDD's no less, but removable... Hot swap-able... and like the ultimate form for the old ZIP disk premise. I do believe I'll be ordering one of these.
I really wish there was a cover that goes in the front so they're not exposed open... maybe even a small magnetic filter that you can just move, insert, slap back on, boom, done. Looks nice and neat, and should be cheap enough to add
Interesting video, I ended up ordering one of the enclosures and a Shuttle XPC machine to create a 'lab' machine. I will report back how it all works out
In my opinion, it's awesome, sure I will buy one soon because it's very useful for me as I have a lot of hard disks laying around
Joao Vitor Word of advice: check their SMART diagnostics. I plugged in 6 drives recently into my machine (UNLIMITED POWAH!-style), 3 of them have read errors and need to be replaced, including my system drive which has a crazy error count on it.
From my experience, Icydock make some great quality stuff, even though it can be pricy. Though I have yet to see another manufacturer make nifty drive bays like Icydock do.
And since SATA natively supports hotswap, this is a cheap way to get hotswap drives, maybe RAID depending on the controller.
Amazing piece of hardware!
This looks really nice, and might just have to consider it when I build my HTPC for running a tripple boot Windows 10, Mint XFCE, and STEAM OS, but I might go with 2.5in SSDHD instead of SSD so I can get more storage space per $. Also I think they could have made the drive case a little bit longer, so there is a door in front of the drives to make look a bit nicer.
Never thought of hardware multibooting. I like the idea of skipping over that selection screen that adds a few secs to every boot up time
Makes it easier to re-image one OS without messing up another as well, although I guess you can just keep an image of the one partition.
very thick floppy disks you have there. :P nice eject mechanism
Your voice is so soothing
Nice mate, im defo buying one for my Winfast windows98se build.
Cool accessory, no pun intended
I like this drive bay! And it's only $43 here. Getting one.
Brilliant! I really need one of these lol!
I've always wanted something like that! I'd have settled even for just a single slot removeable media type drive that you could load your O/S on each disk... of course it relied upon the idea of being able to buy cheap media. Awesome stuff!
youtubasoarus I want something like that. My ideal would be something like the 90s IDE caddies with the key, except for SATA.
Totally! That's something i'd like as well.
a jumper that turns on or turns off the fan right next to where the fan is plugged in is... redundant?
This is awesome. Thanks alot.
could some thing like this be used as a small nas server ? and to have all drives opened at all time ?
I swear Phil you are the Drive bay Master!!..I dont know how i missed this one from so long ago..Yes it would be good for booting multiple OS'S...but could you demonstrate how to multi boot with just ONE drive someday?
I have a ton of drives, so swapping drives works for me. Not a fan of multi-booting with a single drive, to many ways you can totally stuff things up :D
Glue some pencil erasers to them then they will stick out all you like. awsome I like it!!! good review!!!
I have tried a few times to do a software dual boot xp and win 7. With no luck it sorta works but seems to have major slow downs on initial boot. I could not figure it out without unplugging each drive so this looks like an excellent solution for my retro machine. As of right now 39.99 on newegg.
Brilliant!
I could use this for SSDs but... how do you install Windows 98 on an SSD? I'd heard it's frustrating.
neat hardware solution when i multi boot systems i use a boot manager grub seems to be the most robust of them .. origionally i started multi booting systems to facilitate my stepfathers need to test his software on multiple os versions at one point i had a gaming pc that could be booted into dos dos +win 3.11 win 95 98 98 se win 2000 nt 3 and 4 and finally xp all that was out at the time .. currently i tend to just run 2 or 3 os / machine win 10 for gaming and xp same reason and a debian based linux distro for pentesting and networking
This is a very handy device!
This seems like a convenient. One worry I do have though would be if you accidentally pushed an eject button while moving your PC. Worst case scenario that could send a HDD on express route towards the floor.
It should be great to have TWO of these in the same computer and be able to boot with any windows released and even a linux. Is that possible? Having Win95, 98, ME, XP on one, and Vista, Win7, Win8 and Win10 in the other. Also, what kind of setup would be cool to build for a setup like this?
I would think that the recessed power buttons are a bit of a safety feature. You can't brush the front of your computer and turn off a drive unintentionally. That can be especially important. I don't know if that is why they are recessed but it makes sense to me.
Having spend ++time making many multiboot configs on a single hdd, I'd say the convenience of this is too tempting to ignore. And using a 2 x sata to IDE converter, you should be able to use this on older IDE-only mbrds (2 converters to use alll four drives, but then you'll have to sacrifice the optical drives).
You mentioned MS DOS 7.1, please explain. Thanks!
Just imagine triple booting off of each individual drive. 12 operating systems would be awesome.
Hey phils where can i buy retro computer parts?
Marvelous!
would be nice if they made a version that only needed 1 sata cable and when you want to use a drive you select that one and it turns off the other one and so on. seeing as it would be used as a boot system you wouldnt need the other 3 running and with that you can have 3 other internal hard drive using those other 3 sata connectors that the OS's can share if they use the same drive format.
I like that idea :)
SHADOWxWOLF You could accomplish this by using a selector knob or a set of radio buttons attached to each power cable. That would be at least partially a DIY job though.
you have the possibility to enable both solutions with this hardware partition your ssd 's and each powered drive can have a boot manager and multiple os's .. net loss of space lol but for some reasons it is a solution .. thanks for the vids
i need this for my testbench :O
Brillant.
As always, love the videos, Phil. I'd be interested in seeing the next step you would make for Windows XP gaming. You're currently limited by AGP and Pentium 4 , but I'd like to see you build something using XP and PCIe graphics, but keeping the prices the same.
I've done a few projects in that regard, but yes, I agree with you, PCIe is very interesting. In some ways it's cheaper and easier to get parts also. Especially high end AGP cards are on the list of collectors, so they outbid each other. Early PCIe cards are still quite cheap. What sort of system do you have in mind?
The x600 card are a good choice. 6600, 7600, 8600 not really, 9600 are all great card that should be easy to pickup for a low price. Some cheap OEM Core 2 board, I picked one up recently, and you're good to go.
Phil, do you recall what the system specs on this build were? Are they, or something equivalent, perhaps shown on your website someplace?
Sorry I don't remember, it's been too long. Some Pentium 4 I believe though.
I want this device.It seems that I can use it to build a low-end server easily.
This is incredibly cool.
Ohhh my gosh i want one !!!!!!
heh, that's handy for a soft raid 10 setup with a bunch of older laptop drives :)
Great review! Thanks. What is the make/model of the case in the video? It looks relatively compact with lots of front drive bays. Thanks again.
Some case from Aywun. I don't think they make it anymore.
Thanks.
great video Phil
Very cool drive bay. I could see my self, such as 2 drives, one with a windows 7 for gaming, youtube, etc, and a second drive for windows 10 for business/work tasks. I might buy one of these.
windows 7 doesn't support dx12 i think.. sadly
my graphics card is only a GTX 760 which only supports DX 11 as far as I'm aware so I don't think it will matter to much? I might be wrong though
i actually think it does support dx12, Nvidia has a list of supported cards and it goes down to even the 550ti
oh nice, didn't know that :)
:D
This device is perfect for you.
I think it needs a cover for the front for those with kids who like pressing buttons.
Hi Phil! I have been trying to replicate this but I am running into boot issues. I have an ASUS P3V4X motherboard an a Silicon Image 3114 card with the non-raid BIOS. I installed the operating system on each HD prior to setup (via normal IDE connection) - I want to quad boot, XP, 2000, ME and 98SE. When I use the SATA controller and the dock I see the the Windows XP boot screen but then it crashes and I see a blue screen and it never boots. Is there any trick or tip I might be missing to get this working? Thank you!
That sounds familiar. Especially Windows XP can be tricky with SATA controllers, they need the driver integrated. Can you use the Easy2Boot project to install XP? It has a version including SATA drivers. It's nothing straight forward, so not much specific advice I can give you but the issues lies with the SATA driver!
@@philscomputerlab thanks Phil I will give it a try.
i would like to point out that the power button being hard to press is a feature so you don't accidentally turn off the hard disks while in use.
this would be nice if it was just using 1 sata port to share for the 4 drives since it's not running together. nice concept though
Good idea. But a bit dumb it use four SATA ports.would be great if it just used one and switched it to the drive powered on
This would be awesome if they supported 15mm thick 2.5" drives.
I’d love a light grey vesion of this dock, for my 90´s sleeper build with win 98 and xp.
You can always just get a can of spray paint,i am just waiting for spring so i can work on my build out side again.
4 years later.. software multibooting is the standard!
Can you use more than 2 drives at the same time? That is, does the SATA power connector provide enough power to do it. Also, maybe the power buttons are the way they are to avoid accidental ejects when you're in the middle of something.
Yes you can use all 4 drives at once.
I actually thought they would connect to the same port and adress.
This is actually very useful for me down the track, easy access, no mounting, cable management etc. Is there a more secure/covered model to avoid surprise ejecting & dust?
They have something like this: www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=196 I'm sure I did a review on that one a while ago. Here is the link, but this one can take 6 drives! ruclips.net/video/84-9OmECpuE/видео.html
nice I like to get one
How you made these labels for the drives on the thumbnail picture?
With textboxes!
@@philscomputerlab Did you made them yourself or did you bought them? If I put "textboxes ssd" to Google I get only sites about artificial intelligence. Are they made from plastic or carbon or paper?
@@fox-in-the-green Textbox like in PowerPoint!
I actually thought about getting around two douzen of ahrd drives to install different systems.
It makes swapping easier because there is no multi bootloader to worry aboout and the different systems wouldn't interfere with eachother.
I tought about installing everything from DOS up to XP onti IDE and everything from XP upto 10 (including different Linux) onto SATA.
All identical drives to have eliminate drive speed inmact into results.
I wonder if there is something similar for IDE. Haven't seen anything to be honest.
Is the Romtec Trios what you may be looking for? They have at least 2 models I know of. I have the Trios 2 from back in ~2003. They are IDE only drive selectors, not sure if they still make them. I was introduced to them on the workstations in college.
+Gregor Thanks for the tip. There are some on eBay and i just bought two for $5 per piece + shipping. The card takes one PCI slot, but it looks like its a passive card that can be mounted other places too.
what a great product, currently on my home pc i got an NVMe SSD + a mechanical hard disk installed. On the SSD i keep win10, and on the mechanical HD i have win7, windows11, ubuntu 20 and ubuntu21. Its complicated to work with because in order to have all that you need to follow an specific order of installation being the oldest OS the first to install, and then you can choose what to run with the boot menu, But things get nasty when something fails or you need to reinstall windows7 for example, that can ruin the master boot record and that is just a pain. But this product is very nice indeed, i would keep tray1 for DOS+win3.11, tray2 for windos98SE, tray3 for windows XP, tray4 win7, but there is a problem, the product is made for SATA and no real retro pc has SATA, so if you want to use it with something really good lets say a pentium3 with a real ISA SB16 then you can´t. Or if you want to build a real retro voodoo3 or voodoo5 machine then you can´t either. But its very handy for machines that are Pentium4 or athlon xp or later, in which you can get win98(because they had drivers), windows XP, windows7 , windows10, etc. Or try to make it work with a very old PC with a PCI sata card, do you recommend any that can work with windows3.11 , dos, win98 ?
Have you tried using a simple HDD bay? One that lets you remove the drive from the front or rear of the case, just pop in the one with your OS of choice. It might seem excessive at first, but if you have a few older HDDs lying around, at least they get good use and it avoids the issues of complicated multiboot setups like you mention. Such a bay device doesn't cost much...
great product, would like to have
I wonder if your PCI controller allows older motherboards to surpass the size limit of their onboard controllers; other than that, this is much faster and safer than a boot manager.
Yes it does, I don't know the exact limit, but it might be 2 TB?
The only limit in hardware is the LBA48 one, that's at 137GB. Once you're past that the sky is the limit!
Shoulda got the Blackmagic SSD dock.
I'm confused, why wouldn't you just run a virtual machine? it's literally 0 extra cost, 1-30gb hdd space depending on what OS you're running *and* doesn't have all the compatability issues that come with trying to run an old OS on new hard ware.
Fat chance, but is there a way to get something like this going for IDE drives? lol
Or a way to boot from a PCI SATA device on an old motherboard?
Software multi boot is definitely better when using lots of random computers otherwise this looks really good
hold on, you have to have all 4 sata cable connected in order to achieve convenient swapping without opening the case? And only one drive available at a time? Such a waste of limited sata port.
You can use all drives at once of course. I show a very specific use case.
PhilsComputerLab even so, user like me has already filled up most sata ports, this product which necessarily needs four ports connected to be fully flexible is nothing nice.
Just get a SATA controller and you got yourself four extra ports. I don't understand your problem, a drive needs a SATA port, be it internally or in a dock. It's really basic computing stuff. Maybe a USB drive is better for you, more user friendly?
I can see use for it.
This sounds nice but why is it sata, and why does it have 4 ports when it only needs 1? If they made a laptop ide version of this I'd be all over it.
these things arent only for multi boot :D i use mine to quickly switch games out of my steam games folder for my laptop
Nice, good idea.
Thats alot of reverb in that room fella ...
Which direction does the fan blow?
You can see this by looking at how the fan is mounted, the blades are on top of the fan body so it blows out to the back side of the fan, basically it draws air from the front of the HDD Bay through and over the HDD's and out the back into the case.
This is the normal way that fans mounted on HDD Bays are normally configured as they expect you to have proper exhaust fans inside the case too :)
Nice John. That's exactly what it does :)
FYI - you just have to look at any fan and remember this:
If you see the fans label, the air direction is blowing towards you, also many fans do have an air direction arrow on them to show this as well.
This seems to be the case for any fan, even the case fans too :)
EDIT: Phil, I noticed this device states it supports Single-Channel SAS HDD's as well, do you have any of these to test with ?
I know this is probably more expensive then getting a SATA HDD but just wondering if these would work as stated ?
Tell them I'm buying one.
Fuck this is very handy!
but muh hotswapping!
I am glad it's not like the Zip Drive eject mechanism. You would have a lot of messed up HDDs!!!
LOL I remember my old ZIP 100. Some discs would indeed fly out of the drive.
PhilsComputerLab no joke!! I also remember having that happen constantly with the Super Floppy Drive. 😀
joemygod1960 Please elaborate. I've only had a 250 drive and didn't notice anything particularly violent about the ejection.
Swift Fox sometimes my Zip drive would literally shoot the disk out if the drive and onto the floor. This was apparently a thing that happened to some people.
joemygod1960 Wow, had no idea. Thanks for that bit of information :)
It would be even nicer if it had slide switches instead of soft buttons.
Does that dock work at SATA3 speeds?
Yes, it does look at 1:20 the box it say it support up to 6Gb/s so that is SATA3 speed.
Yes it does. It maxes out my SSD.
Many thanks!
Great video as always Phil! When using modern SATA drives this is the way to go in my opinion. However, I do miss doors (or whatever they are called) in the product featured in the video.
I guess they came a long way since my cardreader/USB combo some years ago.
The cardreader part died while inserting the cable (the internal usb connection to the motherboard fell off) and the USB ports followed around 2 years later.
I think I've only tested multi ones, and also an external USB box for 4x 3.5". These newer FlexiDock models are easier to use as you don't have to put the drive into a drive tray first. But yes, you don't get the doors.
Johan, I had a look at these model numbers, they are from a different brand, not Icy Dock. Could you please double check and confirm? Thanks!
It seems that you might be right. I have always thought that Icy Box and Icy Dock was the same brand due the the similarities in name and products.
Yea they are different brands. Would you be so kind and edit the text? Just to avoid confusion. That would be fantastic!
The fans Icy Dock uses don't last more than a year or so. Stock up on replacements!
I only do not trust the fan. I hope it doesn't make a jet engine sound lol.
I like the concept of it and stuff but ~$50 is too high imo. Should be around $25 - $35.
You can get a 2 Bay one for "only" 25 bucks ... seems fine by me.
I have that one actually. It fits into 3.5" bay which is nice, but no power buttons though.
Agreed ... But to be fair, it clearly is a niche market ...
@Jimmy S Unless you want data corruption yea go ahead, its a very bad idea to add toggle switches, laptop drives dont use 12volts dc only 5/3v, the inrush current from switching them off and on could easily destroy an ssd.
Does it support hotswapping?
Nukleon it depends of the motherboard or sata controller, nothing with the multi drive bay
Yes it's like Joao says. The bays support it, but your motherboard also needs to support it. It's usually a setting in the BIOS and then you can eject drives just like with USB flash drives. Then it's save to pull them out.
I usually prefer the software solution (GRUB2) but there have been rumors of Windows 10 destroying Linux partitions and this could be a solution for modern dual boot users. I also see some other applications for this. Thank You!!!
Bill Drouin Ouch. If it does, yet another reason to keep Windows 10 confined to a VM for daily use.
Agreed. Again virtualization is a preferable software solution and much more convenient than dual or multi-booting. But there is overhead with juggling VMs and a machine without plenty of multi-threading (and virtualization VT-x/AMD-v) support and tons of RAM will struggle with that option as well.
Bill Drouin I find that usually with an VT-X, SSD and enough RAM, it's more than workable. As my Windows guest I usually run a stripped down version of Windows XP (try nLite if you haven't already, it's pretty cool). I can easily run about 2 XP guests + Linux host without much of a perceived performance loss.
Bill Drouin And to be fair, the virtual disk files are more of an overhead for me on a daily basis. Especially the dynamic ones, they just seem to grow on and on. They are annoying to deal with when you need more HDD space, since you can't really delete them without decommissioning the associated VM, which is sometimes a pain.
And again I must agree, but my current old hardware lacks all that support. I do currently have a few half built 16 bit guests in my Ubuntu system though I've suspended much of that work because of insufficient RAM.
Meaning I'm still a bit noobish on the subject - regarding the virtual drive bloat wouldn't saving an early drive image as an "appliance" make it easier to "decommission" and rebuild???
I'd be careful when dealing with Windows Xp and multiboot ubuntu was the culprit last I attempted this and was met with a ntdlr error which now is an easy fix back then nothing existed in complication style help tools. ommiting any torrents available were under intense scrutiny.
Well they can't see each other, because he uses one drive at a time. No DualBoot software needed. It's like swapping out a PC's Internal Drive, but on the outside.
+Nayab Warach I was gonna say that, and I'll add it's a pain in the butt to try, and dual boot with Windows 10 , and this would be a great way to do it being able to turn on your windows 10 boot SSD, and storage HDD, and when you want another OS like Linux Mint XFCE power down the system and turn on the SSD/HDD for it, that way there are no issues.