For those of you that don’t know what hot swapping is, it’s the function of swapping and using another hard drive while the computer is still hot (switched on). This can be useful for businesses as they can still operate if other hard drives fail. Recently I have invested in one as I run my own business from home, I also use it for personal computers too as I use an external swap on my network.
The Cube
Enclosures can come in all shapes and sizes, but I prefer the cube! I prefer the cube because it circulates the air flow better around the hard drives. Acer has the ability to store 5 hard drives, which is exactly what I did! I chose to install 5 1TB hard drives giving me a total network space of 5TB, which should last me a good while I think.
Things To Use It For
You can use this for many things not just as a business network, meaning to store all of your important data for the business on incase anything goes wrong! You can also use it as a spare storage device at home and put all of your personal pictures on along with your music, home movies and other files and documents. Having this storage device to hand would be a brilliant asset, we have all had our computers formatted at some point in our lives and lost quite a lot of data, this little beauty will store all of your data on it in the corner of a room for when you need it and the best part is, it’s not connected to the internet so it is completely safe from viruses and hackers alike!
The Costs
The costs can be anywhere between $100-$5000, this really will depend on how much data storage you will need. I paid just short of $500 for mine, I found it was cheaper to buy the enclosure and then buy the hard drives separately, fit it together yourself and you have saved money in the process!
Bio: Before investing in an external device I used sharefile, which took care of all of my data needs for my personal use and business. Having data away from your own computers is essential to keeping it safe and protected from all of the bad guys on the internet.
