Qball's Weblog

Disaster waiting to happen

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Disaster waiting to happen. Nothing else can be said about this:

http://www.thesataswitch.com/

There is nothing wrong with people building things like this for personal use. But selling it? this is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

There are a few things wrong here:

  1. It is no sata switch. It switches power.  That you can use it to switch on/off sata drivers that is a complete other storie.
  2. It is dangerous
    1.  It can be switched when running, easily.  Any child, or grown up child can switch it. This will cause loss of data. System crash and your milk to go sour.
    1. It switches wrong. Ground should not be switched of earlier or simultaneous with the others (how it switches is not determined with these type of switches). This can damage your hardware. If you ever looked at hot plug-able connectors,  you see that ground is first to connect, and the last to disconnect. (this is what the normal sata hotplug-able power plug does, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA. it is also mentioned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_swapping).  I know he mentioned not to switch when power on, but only in the build-guide.
  3. There are good other solutions.

As I said nothing wrong with building one yourself. But selling it..

So please, don’t buy this.

Q