Hot Swap question

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

When connecting or disconnecting a drive in a Hot Swap (AHCI enabled machine) is there any difference between unplugging or plugging the drive manually VS pulling out or sliding in a Hot Swap drive bay?

EDIT: i mean is there anything I need to be concerned about or aware of

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't believe so, the bay is just a physical point of contact that makes it easier to unplug. I may be wrong though, but pretty sure there's no difference.

 

[Rubycon]

No and as a matter of fact I do it frequently with both HDD and optical drives!
I always unplug the SATA cable first then unplug the power. Don't try both at the same time! Also if you unplug the power first the system is still connected to the device as it drains so (in theory) this is not as "safe". Pulling the SATA cable out is a clean disconnect to the OS.

Adding a device is the reverse - plug in power first. If this is a mechanical drive give it 10 seconds for spin up then connect your SATA cable.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

nm, just read your post Ruby; Thanks much

And thanks to you too RedSquirrel

 

[M0RPH]

I have a hot swap tray with a power switch and always power it down before taking it out.. I would not feel comfortable just yanking the drive out but thats just me.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I have a hot swap tray with a power switch and always power it down before taking it out.. I would not feel comfortable just yanking the drive out but thats just me.

I feel ya. I'm actually waiting for those AMS Hot Swap cages to arrive (monday) I'm kinda excited about them. They also have power switches.

 

[M0RPH]

I feel ya. I'm actually waiting for those AMS Hot Swap cages to arrive (monday) I'm kinda excited about them. They also have power switches.

Have a link for those?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

3-bay
4-bay

 

[Rubycon]

I yank things all the time without notification and never received flack.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Well, anytime I try and do this, the OS freezes. I do hear my Vcraptor i mean Vraptor power down briefly because the SATA power cord is on the same series. But to test this I tried plugging a drive on another series of plugs and the machine just froze up.

I am using a P5Q premium with the latest Marvell 61XX SATA driver on a P45 & Intel ICH10R

Do I need the Intel Matrix Driver or some other driver for AHCI to work? I thought I did the registry fix for this.

 

[Rubycon]

Well, anytime I try and do this, the OS freezes. I do hear my Vcraptor i mean Vraptor power down briefly because the SATA power cord is on the same series. But to test this I tried plugging a drive on another series of plugs and the machine just froze up.

I am using a P5Q premium with the latest Marvell 61XX SATA driver on a P45 & Intel ICH10R

Do I need the Intel Matrix Driver or some other driver for AHCI to work? I thought I did the registry fix for this.

Not to sound smart but what drive are you pulling out?
If it's the OS drive of course it will freeze!

Not familiar with that board but it sounds like you're using a third party SATA host NOT the Intel ICH ports. This is why I never liked ESATA, for example.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I don't remember if I tried it before I installed the Marvell driver or not. There was a series of things I did that I thought I had to do to get Drive Xpert to be optional in the bios which later I found I had to enable the PATA IDE option in bios to enable Drive Xpert. Then the 4 SATA ports on the Sil5723 chip were recognizing any drive I would hook up to it from a cold boot (not hot plugging) but that became a mess when rebooting. Going though the boot process added 1 minute to the boot-up time ( i timed in on my phone-stop-watch) and sometimes the driver for the SiL chipset would flake out and leave the boot in an endless loop. Since then I scratched the SATA port expansion adventure to just using the 6 on the ICH10R SB chip. I currently can't test it now because I am formatting 2 F3 HD103SJs

I will try it after these are done formating... btw, I installed the new Intel Rapid Storage Techonology driver Intel RST 9.6 which i hear is suppose to allow TRIM on a RAID-0 setup..

 

[Rubycon]

I don't remember if I tried it before I installed the Marvell driver or not. There was a series of things I did that I thought I had to do to get Drive Xpert to be optional in the bios which later I found I had to enable the PATA IDE option in bios to enable Drive Xpert. Then the 4 SATA ports on the Sil5723 chip were recognizing any drive I would hook up to it from a cold boot (not hot plugging) but that became a mess when rebooting. Going though the boot process added 1 minute to the boot-up time ( i timed in on my phone-stop-watch) and sometimes the driver for the SiL chipset would flake out and leave the boot in an endless loop. Since then I scratched the SATA port expansion adventure to just using the 6 on the ICH10R SB chip. I currently can't test it now because I am formatting 2 F3 HD103SJs

I will try it after these are done formating... btw, I installed the new Intel Rapid Storage Techonology driver Intel RST 9.6 which i hear is suppose to allow TRIM on a RAID-0 setup..

It allows Win7 to pass TRIM to drives configured as non raid. Drives configured as RAID members will NOT get TRIM. That's what I am told. If you need a self maintaining array currently use SSDs that have GC.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Is TRIM a Win7 thing only? Or will it work for Vista as well?

EDIT: and if i have to buy a copy of Win7, what the caveat about OEM versions?

 

[Rubycon]

Is TRIM a Win7 thing only? Or will it work for Vista as well?

EDIT: and if i have to buy a copy of Win7, what the caveat about OEM versions?

Yes why bother with Vista? It will be quickly forgotten about and the ones not running it are still on XP.

You can download a trial that works for a couple months I believe. Most people can do this and save up during the trial period and just buy it before it expires.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

The problem is I have to buy Win7 while I have to good copies of Vista Ultimate 64

What about the OEM versions, what's the caveats about them compared to the retail versions?

 

[RebateMonger]

I have a hot swap tray with a power switch and always power it down before taking it out.. I would not feel comfortable just yanking the drive out but thats just me.

My clients yank out SATA backup drives every week to swap them out. No "safely remove" or anything. They've been doing it for three years now without any problems. That's thousands of such swaps on many Server 2003 boxes.

These are Granite Digital hot-swap SATA trays, connected to PCI or PCI-E disk controllers with Silicon Image 3112 or 3152 chipsets. The backups are tested monthly to ensure they are readable.

I haven't looked into it, but my understanding is that the SATA connectors, at least in these trays, are set so that when the disk is pulled, the connections that need to be disconnected first automatically lose their connection first.