Once you’ve built your very own computer; picked out the perfect motherboard, the best CPU, a swift videocard and assembled it all in a case that says "Hey! This is MY PC", it’s time to come back to earth and deal with the day to day challenges computers occassionally present. At one point or another we’ve all faced down spyware, drivers that broke things, a blue screen of death or two and a failed hard drive. It was a hard drive failure in 2003 that lead to PCSTATS long line of Beginners Guides, starting with the life-saving Guide to Data Recovery .

Since then PCSTATS has heard from countless readers who have lost precious family photos or years of work, and thankfully many recovered all their data with aid of that Guide. The alternative is a $2000 bill from a data recovery lab – a bitter pill to swallow, but if your data is important and you haven’t backed it up there are no alternatives.

After I lost a hard drive and just barely managed to recover 90% of the data on it I vowed never, NEVER, to save my important work on a single hard drive ever again. From then on it’s been smooth sailing under the protective cover of RAID 1. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and the "1" designates the kind of RAID array where the same data is mirrored on two identical hard disks. If one drive fails, there’s always an up to date working copy at hand. Take a look at this Guide to RAID if you’d like to learn more, it’s not difficult to set up since RAID is a standard feature on most motherboards these days.

Lately I’ve found hard drive racks the most convenient way to manage pairs of RAID 1 drives (1TB Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS in case you wondered). Forced cooling is often part of multi-bay drive racks to prevent excessive heat build up, something that isn’t always so with PC chassis. A hot swappable backplane means I never have to fiddle with plugs and data cables, and the drives are always at hand for remote backups or upgrades.

Awhile ago PCSTATS look into Icydock’s MB454SPF-B hard drive backplane module, it fits in the space of three 5.25" drive bays and holds four 3.5" SATA hard drives. Each hard drive needs rails screwed onto it first, but now Icydock is offering a new hot swap module of the same proportions called the MB674SPF-B which is completely tool free. Just open up one of the four bays, slide a SATA hard drive in and close the door. The hard drive automatically engages with SATA data and power connectors, no screws required!

The ICYDock MB674SPF-B is a seriously convenient Serial ATA hard drive backplane module, it retails for about $120 USD. It does not come with hard drives.