Hot Plugging

[Seekermeister]

I'm accustomed to hot plugging USB devices, but I found an article on the WDC website, that said that if the SATA power connector was used, vs the molex, that it was hot pluggable. Is this really safe?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
I'm accustomed to hot plugging USB devices, but I found an article on the WDC website, that said that if the SATA power connector was used, vs the molex, that it was hot pluggable. Is this really safe?

Safe in what manner? Safe electrically or physically, or safe for the data on the hard drive.

SATA is designed so that it can be hot swappable. If you look at the plug, you will see that the ground wires extent further than the rest. This is so that they are the first connected when connecting the power, and last to break contact when disconnecting. So electrically isn't not that much of a problem.

However, as for the data on the drive, you have to have a setup that allows you to remove the drive, such as in a RAID configuration with a drive. Most RAID controllers will autodetect drive removal as well as additions to the array. I wouldn't ever recommend hot-swapping any drive that is not connected to a RAID controller (one that is plugged into the mobo, not onboard RAID controllers).

 

[SparkyJJO]

I've hot-plugged IDE drives before....
Only on systems that really didn't matter though, and the only bad thing that has happened is the transfer rates were slow, I'm guessing due to it not being in the BIOS and everything.

 

[Seekermeister]

Fullmetal Chocobo,

Safe in what manner? Safe electrically or physically, or safe for the data on the hard drive.

Considering the voltage, I'm not concerned about physical harm, assuming that you mean personal bodily harm. I'm not sure what you mean by electrically. My question regarded harm to the data on the drive, as well as physical harm to the drive, as well as other components of the system.

My system only has a 2 drive raid capacity, but I have a third, which I intend to do some diagnostics with. It would be alot easier if I did not need to shutdown everytime to switch drives around. This would mean removing and adding drives to the array. To this point, the new drive isn't being recognized by the bios, causing the machine not to boot at all.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Fullmetal Chocobo,

Safe in what manner? Safe electrically or physically, or safe for the data on the hard drive.

Considering the voltage, I'm not concerned about physical harm, assuming that you mean personal bodily harm. I'm not sure what you mean by electrically. My question regarded harm to the data on the drive, as well as physical harm to the drive, as well as other components of the system.

My system only has a 2 drive raid capacity, but I have a third, which I intend to do some diagnostics with. It would be alot easier if I did not need to shutdown everytime to switch drives around. This would mean removing and adding drives to the array. To this point, the new drive isn't being recognized by the bios, causing the machine not to boot at all.

Well, regarding bodily harm, remember it's amperage that kills, not voltage. Higher voltage just makes it hurt more (440v, 400Hz hurts the worst by the way).

But I was referring to the physical drive itself. And even though you might be able to hot-swap the drives, they still have to be formatted, and setup in a RAID array. So depending on how you have the drives setup, you may or not be able to. If you have each drive setup by iteself, in a non-RAID configuration, and all of the hard drives are pre-formatted, then you can hot swap them. But if you are trying to remove the drives with the OS, you are most definitely going to get an error. But say you have the OS drive installed, and you are trying to hot-swap data drives (much like one would with USB thumb drives), then you could hot-swap them.

This is all depending if your OS will allow you to do this as well.

 

[Seekermeister]

My SATAs are in a raid 1 array. I know that if a drive is disconnected prior to power up, it will offer to rebuild the array. But, I have no idea of what would happen if a new drive was exchanged after powerup. Can the bios make changes while powered up?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
My SATAs are in a raid 1 array. I know that if a drive is disconnected prior to power up, it will offer to rebuild the array. But, I have no idea of what would happen if a new drive was exchanged after powerup. Can the bios make changes while powered up?

Okay... If the controller supports hot-swapping / hot-plugging, then yes, you can remove the dead drive, and replace it, and it will automatically begin rebuilding the array. To find out if it can do this, the best thing to do is go through the manual...

 

[Seekermeister]

The one thing that I have learned from the manual, is that it rarely answers any questions, except those that are fairly obvious in the first place. I'll take a look at it, after another couple of cups of coffee.