Hot Swap Drive Recommendations
Large datasets of tens to hundreds of GBs are common on the UltraMicroscope-II light-sheet (Snape) and the Dragonfly spinning disk (Hermione). On those systems, transferring data can be become a bottleneck. To move data as quickly as possible, we suggest you purchase a system that allows you to insert and remove (“hot swap”) an SSD drive into our acquisition and analysis computers. Once inserted into those computers, the SSD is quickly recognized as an internal hard drive.The advantage of this is that you can plug this hard drive into our acquisition computer and write data directly to it. When you are done, you can just pop the drive out and leave; there is no additional time to transfer data. Your datasets will move as fast as you can walk. We have the same hot swap cages on our analysis workstation, the light-sheet, and the Dragonfly, so you can easily and quickly move data between these systems.
We suggest you buy a 2TB (at least) SATA SSD and put it into a hot swap cage. Our suggestion is to set up the same cage system we have at MSL on your desktop system, if applicable, or to buy a USB3 adapter for the cage system.
For a desktop setup, the exact hot swap dock you get depends on what power connectors you have on your desktop computer. You will have to check your computer’s power supply and see what cables you have available: Molex, SATA 15 pin or something else. For example:
If you don’t have a desktop computer, you can get a hot swap bay with a USB3 adapter.
For the SSD we use a Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD (MZ-76E2T0E), but any SSD above 2TB should be fine; there is nothing essential about that model or brand.
We strongly suggest you do NOT get a non-SSD hard drive.