Orico Unveils HDD Power Switch

[btarunr]

Have tons of hard-drives plugged to internal ports in your machine? Want control over which ones stay on, and don't trust your OS or apps to wake random drives up from their slumber, stepping up noise and power draw? Orico has a solution for you. The HD-PW6102 is an accessory that fits into any of your multiple empty 5.25-inch drive bays, and gives you manual switches to six SATA power cables. The device draws power from two 4-pin Molex connectors, and gives out six SATA power cables, which are sleeved. Each of the six cables can be manually plugged out of the box.

To use the HD-PW6102 properly, the SATA controller needs to be set in AHCI mode, with hot-plugging enabled. The device manually gates power to drives to turn them off. With AHCI hot-plugging enabled, you can use the "safely remove hardware" menu in your system tray to deactivate a drive before switching it off with the device. To use the drive again, simply switch it on, and the OS mounts it like any other PnP storage volume. In addition to push-switches, it has power indicators for each of the six drives. The main body and front bezel are made of brushed aluminum. The accessory started selling in Orico's homeland China, where it's priced at 373 RMB (US $60).



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[TheLostSwede]

No wire mess there, none at all...

 

[Sasqui]

No wire mess there, none at all...

LOL They could have done a better job with the photo shoot for sure. The idea is good for drives used as an occasional backup or server rigs that don't need all drives on.

 

[Depth]

I just sit eagerly and await some idiot to hook up his SSD's to this thing

 

[freaksavior]

I really don't see the benefit of this.

 

[theJesus]

I really don't see the benefit of this.

It certainly is a niche product. And I think it would be better if they had the switches behind a protective cover to prevent accidentally switching off a drive while it's still in use.

 

[freaksavior]

It certainly is a niche product. And I think it would be better if they had the switches behind a protective cover to prevent accidentally switching off a drive while it's still in use.

Maybe so. I think it's for the 16 year old kid who built his first computer, invites all his nerdy high school friends over, and then says, "watch this" and turns off a hard drive just because he can.

 

[TRWOV]

Orico also has a SATA switch which I find that much more useful for dual booting. This device has its uses, as Sasqui commented, but for 6 drives? I can't really think of a situation where you would need to turn off 6 hard drives...

 

[Th3pwn3r]

it's for the 16 year old kid who built his first computer, invites all his nerdy high school friends over, and then says, "watch this" and turns off a hard drive just because he can.

Agreed. It's trash in my opinion.

 

[patrico]

yeah strange bit of kit, id say the market for it is tiny, dont think id ever have a use for it.

 

[TheNightFly]

I recently bought two new hard drives. I installed windows on one and then I installed Linux on the other. I set my bios to boot into the windows drive by default.

For some reason, windows explorer couldn't even see the Linux drive. I assumed it was because it was formatted differently. After a couple of weeks, while I was using windows, my Linux drive started making a whining noise. I could tell it was a head crash. I restarted my computer and booted into Linux and it seemed to work just fine.

I decided to unplug the power cord to the Linux drive and, after some time I decided to just reformat it back to NTFS. But then the windows installation disk couldn't read the drive at all. It couldn't even reformat it. After that I couldn't even boot into Linux. The drive was RIP.

I eventually learned online that if you don't physically unplug the windows drive before installing Linux, the Linux installer will copy the boot loader to the windows drive. which can screw up the boot partitions of both drives. I guess I was lucky my windows drive is still okay.

If you plan on running multiple OSs on the same computer, this thing would make life a ton easier.

 

[g8wayrebel]

Orico also has a SATA switch which I find that much more useful for dual booting. This device has its uses, as Sasqui commented, but for 6 drives? I can't really think of a situation where you would need to turn off 6 hard drives...

I can see it for families , I set up one with IDE for 3 users in my parents house. My Mom , Dad and Niece each had an install on their own HDD so none of them messed up the others and each could have their own programs installed. I am currently in search of one for SATA , which is what brought me here.