Trios I and II Drive Switchers

Picked up these gadgets on my last thrift store trip, finally had a reason to check them out, but honestly I was most interested in the electronics. Here's a deep dive into the circuitry of two IDE hard drive transfer switches.
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[@BenjaminKibbey]

I love that four years ago, you were essentially the same channel doing the same things you are now. What makes your show worth watching now is really what made it worth watching then, even with all the work you've put in on setup and presentation. I think a lot of aspiring KZbinrs could learn from that.

[@ospididious]

I really appreciate how you just own and share any mistakes or hubris you experience in making these videos. It gives your videos more credibility as a real person and not just some presenter that works for production company X that has five other presenters on 15 other channels doing small variations of the same script. Keep up the great work.

[@CountDuckula07]

Got a good laugh out of the epilogue, glad you left the preceding part of the video as-is

[@lishd]

"this is simple enough i can probably explain it to you." what a beautiful secret insult in that comment that is, from context clues, meant to have the word "even" before "i". :)

[@bigloudnoise]

Only now discovering a lot of your older videos. This reminds me of my first self-built system where I cobbled together a homemade boot selector switch for two hard drives. Mine wasn't this complex though, all it did was use a couple key lock switches salvaged from some old PC cases to swap which drive was designated Primary and which one was Secondary, same as if I were to physically swap the jumpers on the drive. Granted, my method lacks the safeguard of stopping you from changing the switches while the system is running (although this is why I used key lock switches and not toggle switches), and it only supports two drives instead of three. But, it worked well for my purposes.

[@javierburke3270]

Picked up a Trios II at my local thrift a few weeks back...wasn't sure at first if it would be useful but, like yourself, ended up being a very good decision. Installed on a P4 / Intel mobo and the only issue I had was the remote board itself took some time to start working (maybe oxidation in there? Not sure). Fine since then....mainly using it for two things 1) separate OS runs without the need for a multi-boot setup and 2) one drive for occasional cloning purposes. I like that there's no power to the drives when not used, that was the biggest selling point to keep it installed on this PC.

[@toasTr0n]

I love when geniuses have idiot moments and aren't too proud to admit them to the world. Everyone makes mistakes like this. Neglecting to share them would be doing a disservice to yourself and to the self-image of others who look up to you. Really enjoyed the technical analysis on this as well.

[@KarlHamilton]

Even the early videos were brilliant. Possibly even better, I like the rawness.

[@kuzadupa185]

Back in th3 day me and 2 friends all bought the exact same drive switchers and used them as our warez backup drivers, and on a somewhat regular schedule we would swap/rotate the drives between each other, and hold them for enough time to copy over the content we didnt have. A few others found out and wanted to get in on this but out of 4 of them only 1 was compatible, but that one that worked... well the owner broke the FIRST RULE OF WAREZ CLUB!!!! THE HARD DRIVE WAS EMPTY!!!!! WTH?!

[@protheu5]

What a twist at the end!

[@projectz975]

going back to old CRD videos has the similar feel to listening back on old Mountain Goats records back when it was just John Darnielle singing into a tape recorder

[@rricci]

The Chinenglish version of telling to set the drives to CABLE SELECT was probably written as "Ensure if you please hard drive set to CABLE SELECT".

[@Colaholiker]

Insulation Displacement Connectors. Now I finallyy know what their "IDC" name in KiCad stands for. (English is not my native language, and in German their name has nothing to do with what IDC stands for...)

[@IdleSummer]

Love this. Been getting into hardware reverse engineering lately, and it's fascinating.

[@tituslafrombois1164]

Love watching these older vids, if this were made today we wouldn't have seen your presumptive angry rant and the video would have just hard cut to you in the editing bay, talking about how you

[@eekee6034]

It's good to see a diagram for the ribbon cable. There are too few diagrams on KZbin outside of the math channels! :) It's nice to see pinout lookup on a retrotech channel too; too many people just don't know how to use that info.

[@Just.A.T-Rex]

Oh how far you’ve come!

[@stevedaenginerd]

I'm finding that I enjoy going through old & vintage kit such as these! I'm going to keep an eye out for one (or two) of these. I'd love to see if I could figure anything more out about how these types of devices work! 🤓

[@rustkitty]

"That's absurd, who does that?!" I do that to mechanically dual-boot, almost daily! Products like that are made even today, and I have one for SATA to switch between my Windows and Linux SSDs. However that only switches the power connectors, which makes sense considering that SATA is hot-swappable. It is great, becuase I don't need to worry about boot loaders, or Windows Update breaking whenever it sees a Linux partition! (This happened too many times with me while dual booting.) So it's just cleaner, safer and easier that the two drives are never used simultaneously. I have a shared disk too, for backups or in case I need to transfer between the two, though that never happened yet.

[@concr3t3]

That wood and brass screwdriver is a handsome tool