If you haven't used CRU products before, and are looking for a reliable removable hard disk system, then stop looking and go to CRU.

To determine what product you need, first check out the CRU Dataport Page.

Buy from a reputable vendor, not ebay, these have a real warranty, which might not be covered if you buy it from ebay.

It's hard to find cru stuff online because it's only pro, not consumer.

If you get the aluminum version you'll see what I mean about the level of CRU quality, it's like a Mercedes Benz, but the plastic versions should be adequate for most people's needs.

Things to check: internal connector is sata 2, supports sata 2, I think most of them now do, but if you buy on ebay you might end up with the old sata 1 series. Make sure also the form factor isn't dell, cru has a bunch of different options, so make sure you're getting the right one, then just stick to that exact model from then on, that way you can swap the trays on all your client systems and you don't have to think anything more about it.

I really like these things, the quality is just amazingly good, I've talked to their top support people about some unrelated issues, which is why by the way I stopped using firewire, he told me all firewire controllers have a bug that I discovered re large file transfers that is not fixable, including theirs.

Another small gotcha is that early sata mother boards do NOT support true sata hot swapping, those are the old ones, the first ones, where the sata channels are not true dedicated, but shared the main system bus with pci.

If you get SIL controllers they work more reliably with linux, that's very common, but check that's what the mobo has.

Also, six sata channel mobos can pay off too because you can, if you choose, then run 2 mirrors and 1 backup and one os drive, plus ide for cdrom/dvd.

Hint: always get a dvd burner as well, in case you decide you want to create dvd backups, they cost almost the same as a cd burner, very cheap.
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