Tool-less design? How easy is it to hot-swap HDDs?
2049255
well you need to unscrew the case to get to the drive so no way i can think of. you could eject it, unplug it, open it up, and put in a new one. would take you a few minuets to do but its possible.
2049256
I leave the cover off mine. And after sticking on some large bumper feet, I have the Vantec lying flat on my desktop. I change out drives on it almost every day and there have been zero problems. But to clarify: I don't exactly "hot-swap" them, just meaning that I do perform the windows "Safely Remove Hardware" routine, then I power down the Vantec before I remove/replace a drive.
1609634
You can do that but the drive rebuilding process takes a long time and this unit isn't hot-swappalbe so you would have to shut down and open the case. You can attach external drives and back up files to them.
999370
You will not be able to use the direct copy feature to do this as it requires the drives to be the same size. You can connect the device to a computer and copy the data to that first and then to the new drive.
1681089
I have done a few hard drive and SSD swaps and upgrades using the drive copy tool with Mini Tool Partition Wizard free addition from partitionwizard.com
2178536
I have no idea. However my experience with servers tells me that you need a backplane and associated programming to handle a "hot swap".
542073
It was pretty easy. I am not a "handy" person and I did not have a problem. Just a screw drive. I was happily surprised at how easy it was.
81670
Yes, you should be able to. I initially had some issues with Toshiba USB 3.0 portable hard disks and one DS214+ and for efficiency sake just switched to Western Digital drives. Never re-checked the Toshibas to see if it might have been a temporary incompatibility that went away with updates to the DSM software on the DiskStation.
317856
Yes, that is very easy. The system will then use the redundant data to reorganize how the data is organized on your drives. If you have enough drive capacity and enough drives it can also be set up to keep your data even with two drive failures. So if you swap out a drive, it will then rebuild the data allocations to accommodate that. The key point is that it does all the thinking for you in the background to manage it.
326289
Unless there are limitations imposed by your motherboard, you can; however, the concept of using striped format is really something that helps hard drives with movable disks. Nevertheless, I've never tried it, but it sounds feasible. Good luck
356280
Reporting as promised! just did the swap, first time I've done this, no problems whatsoever. Fits the FW like a glove. Bought the acomdata tango external enclosure and used Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 (free 15 day trial) to clone the hard drive. Now I have 243gb free space instead of 9gbs. The whole thing took 4 hours (because the 250gb HD was practically full). Very easy. So, go for it I guess. Oh, and the windows experience index jumped from 4.6 to 4.7 due to the higher HD transfer rate (which went from 5.1 to 5.9)also boosting the graphics performance from 4.6 to 4.7. Good luck.
980884
I haven't, but it's actually got front access so even fast swapping should be quite easy
4655
I did, very easy. You do want the mini screwdriver if you don't have it. I did not buy a formatted disk so Apple Genius helped me with that part.
1868048
There are much easier ways to move your data than removing the optical drive and installing a second internal - which you would also need. I would hire a competent person to do the data migration for you. "Buy a sled" isn't really the solution.
1000723
Yes that is possible. The harddisk is accessable and replaceable. If you want you can also add it to the machine. However there is no mounting bracket for it. So you would have to get creative. But there are enough sata ports.
1551812
Yes, it essentially turns the new drive into the old one. I did this on a Acer netbook and it worked fine after swapping to the cloned drive.
1972179
No, it does not. You will have to purchase that separately, along with, or use a SATA HD dock and drive copying software, if you have at home. You can download Minitool Drivecopy for free. Note that some drive copy software don't make the new copy drive bootable, so you might have to configure the BIOS settings to make the new drive with the copy bootable or use a twin slot standalone HD duplicator that copies sector by sector including the HPA. That way the new drive will boot without having to do any BIOS configuration.
1423756
Yes you can, you can buy a new SLIM HDD laptop drive and change it yourself, carefully and remember that by doing that you are probably voiding your warranty