Any reason to disable SATA hot swapping?

[BD2003]

Are there any performance or stability ramifications for keeping SATA hot swapping enabled? Or any other reasons not to enable it? If not....why is it even an option in my bios?

 

[Cerb]

Generally, no, unless it's a VIA or nForce. But then, just using the onboard SATA could lead to stability problems. 😉

It must be old, and maybe there were occasional drives that didn't like it. Most BIOSes didn't have any such options, instead just offing IDE/native/AHCI/RAID, at most, even way on back prior to AHCI being available or common.

I wouldn't think disabling it would do any good.

 

[Cerb]

It is the problem of saving data in hard drive.

No such problem exists, unless hot-swap is disabled, though, which is why it's weird to have as an option by itself.

 

[Elixer]

IIRC, the only reason they have an option in the BIOS is for extra security.
While many won't change it from Enabled, some places require it disabled, since they don't want "people" from trying a hotswap for nefarious reasons.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Maybe this is fixed by now but it used to be the case that you would get the 'you can now safely disconnect your drive' message if you had hotswap enabled and set your disks to go to sleep.

 

[Coup27]

I always have it set to disabled in my systems. I think when SSD's first came out there were problems left right and centre and one piece of advice floating around was to disable hot swapping. The only problem I have experienced by having it disabled was secure erasing an Intel SSD in Windows using the Intel SSD Toolbox. It wouldn't work because the drive wouldn't be detected again after i unplugged it to unlock the frozen state. I enabled it for that, but disabled it again after.

Either way, I always disable things I don't use in BIOS such as hot swapping, serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard & mouse only in POST, boot drive only in POST, Intel smart connect and rapid start etc... I think this all helps to add up to a faster system with less potential for bugs.

 

[BrightCandle]

The only reason I can think there might be a performance difference is with regards to cached writes. In theory at least if you know the hard drive is going to be there then you can cache and combine writes in a way that isn't possible if the hard drive is hot swappable and might just get pulled. But in practice I don't think there is much in the way of a genuine difference, they could implement one but see how hot swap works in Windows it has time to go about preparing the drive.

I always disable it for drives installed in the machine, because if I am pulling out that drive I am guaranteed to have the machine off, but I know of no known reduction in performance for having it on.

 

[code65536]

The only reason I can think there might be a performance difference is with regards to cached writes. In theory at least if you know the hard drive is going to be there then you can cache and combine writes in a way that isn't possible if the hard drive is hot swappable and might just get pulled. But in practice I don't think there is much in the way of a genuine difference, they could implement one but see how hot swap works in Windows it has time to go about preparing the drive.

I always disable it for drives installed in the machine, because if I am pulling out that drive I am guaranteed to have the machine off, but I know of no known reduction in performance for having it on.

Write-caching is set by the OS, and Windows doesn't seem to care if the drive is marked as hot-swappable.

The setting exists because the BIOS doesn't know how your drives are set up.

For example, I have a mini-ITX board with 6 SATA ports. Two of those ports connect to internal screwed-in drives. Four of those ports connect to hot-swap bays. So in the BIOS, I disable hot-swapping for the internal drives and enable them for the bays. Then, in Windows, the safe-removal dialog shows removal options for the 4 bays that I've marked, but not for the 2 screwed-in drives.

Anyway, controlling what shows up in the Windows hardware safe-removal dialog* is the reason I bother with those settings.


* Assuming that your storage controller driver isn't brain-dead. iaStor, for example, is brain-dead and does not properly report to the OS on whether a drive is hot-swappable. Which makes hot-swapping a royal pain since I need to go through other means to make sure that everything is properly flushed (since caching is turned on--i.e., these drives are not optimized for quick removal). The latest driver (which also removed support for the 6-series chipset) apparently finally fixed this problem (gee, and it only took how many years?). Intel's broken handling of hotswap is the reason I use msahci on my storage server and my desktop (which also has a hot-swap bay as well as an eSATA port on the same controller) instead of iastor. (Intel has never had a great track record when it comes to driver quality.)