Any easy way to disable/switch between hard drives?

[Lee James]

Is there an easy way to quickly disable/switch hard drives without physically disconnecting them?

It's just that I've got a lot of drives I don't use as much - small older drives, backups, archived stuff etc. I don't need these hooked up all the time, nor would there be enough cables to do that anyway. Plus I've also been thinking about running two different operating systems from the same machine, so I'd need some way to switch before booting.

Surprised there doesn't seem to be any switcher cables out there. How do most people deal with multiple hard drives? Is it only me who keeps all his older drives for extra space/backups?

 

[Lee James]

Thanks for the great replies guys!

What type of drive SATA or nvme?

SATA (all HDDs except for my OS drive which is SSD).

Multibooting isn’t a big deal, no need for multiple drives can all be done from partitions on the same drive

Interesting, I thought the boot drive always had to be the primary partition? Nevertheless, I don't want multiple operating systems to be accessible at once in case I get a virus on one, it would infect both. My whole reason for wanting two operating systems is security. One will be used only for web browsing, the other will be offline, used for everything else.

I do this by enabling/disabling required sata drives in the bios (Asus B650E-F). Don't think NVME drives can be controlled this way (outside of server/workstation class boards).

Great idea, thanks! (Though I would worry that a virus could somehow mount it from Windows. Not sure if this is possible?)


I've decided I will:
1) Try to ditch all the old smaller drives, to keep my drives down to just 6, so they can all be physically connected.
2) Then I'll use the BIOS to enable/disable the ones I want.

Thanks!