Hot Swappable Hard Drives

[DreamKaZz]

Hi, I have some NT and Win 2000 stations that i would need to remove drives and insert drives into those station while windows is running. Anyones know the best solution using hardware, software, etc? How would it work?

Thanks

 

[Cyph3r]

You would need a fault-taularant system..this has less to do with the OS and more to do with the chasis itself. If you look at the top-of-the-line Dell PowerEdge servers or other carrier class servers, they have hot-pluggable drives..you would need something like that..you cannot do the same thing with your home pc..Regards

 

[Wik]

This what I do on my Win2k machines. I have some Hot Swap drive trays. I have the Bios set to detect this device automatically. Now If I need to pull a drive and swap in a different one I go into device manager and remove the drive first. Then I turn the key that turns off the drive and unlocks it. I pull it out and swap in the next drive and then turn the key back on. I then right click in device manager and choose "scan for hardware changes" It finds the new drive and I can now access it. Never had to restart.

Hot Swap trays

 

[Damaged]

Ouch. I thought someone would refer to the ATA swapable trays. I think not. My experience with those has not been good. Personally I think you go SCSI SCA all the way. Yes it's more expensive but it works EVERY SINGLE time without fail.

 

[Wik]

I have SCSI trays in my server and yes they are nice. I assumed he was talking about IDE drives so that is why I posted. So because your experience with ATA trays has been bad you have to crap on ATA? Seems funny that I have 4 systems using ATA drives in cheap trays and no problems. Maybe your experience is lacking.

 

[Damaged]

Well would you prefer that since we've run over 200 machines with swapable ATA trays and had problems that I say that it's good?

 

[DreamKaZz]

hi damage do you have links to those scsi sca trays with price, info...

thanks

 

[Damaged]

Let me explain our usage of the ATA trays that we used. Basically our CS and Tech departments "hoteled" drives. Meaning, people shared a machine but each had their own drive. So these drives would be swapped out A LOT. MUCH more than normal for a server application.

Now you're gonna ask why we used hot swappable. Basically we decided to spend the extra money on this, because we certainly didn't need these drives to be hot swapable, figuring we might get more mileage out of them in the long run (e.g. find a real use for the hot-swap capability some time in the future). So these drives got swapped as much as three times a day. Which, admittedly, is MUCH more than you'll do in a normal server.

The problem that arose from this was that after use the rails would become sloppy and alignment became a problem.

So, in reflecting upon my experience I would have to say that those trays may be just fine for their normal intended use as my experience was a bit unlike what they were probably designed for.

With all that said. I'm still a firm believer in SCSI drives for server application. Why? Durability. SCSI drives always have a higher MTBF than their ATA/IDE counterparts. SCSI drives also cost a lot more as well. The real reason that the SCSI drives cost more is because they are manufactured better and with better parts than their ATA/IDE counterparts. ATA/IDE is really a consumer grade product and SCSI is a commercial grade product.

I know, I know. Someone here is going to have a story about AN ATA/IDE drive that's lasted for years without failure. Anecdotal evidence. I have seen, and I know we have had SCSI drives in production boxes for many years without failure. Much more so than any ATA/IDE drives. The norm for SCSI drives is that you need to replace the drive because it doesn't meet your storage needs anymore.

So it all depends on your tolerance for failure and your budget. If you're willing to live with more risk of failure and the server isn't mission critical, then ATA is probably fine. If you are not willing to make these sacrifices then you need to look at a SCSI solution.

 

[Damaged]

You can find everything you need here: HyperMicro Systems.

The owner is a friend of one of the people I work with. No I don't get anything for recommending. It's a good store though with good products and a STELLAR reputation. You can check out his ranking of 6.7 (out of 7) with a 147 replies at Reseller Ratings..

They are not always the cheapest, but they're close and they'll take good care of you.

 

[CTR]

How big a drive are you talking about DreamKaZz? I use 140MB ATA PCMCIA Flash cards all the time as temp storage. Maybe you can even get larger ones.

 

[Wik]

Holy cow three times a day is alot of swapping. We only need to swap out ours here like once a month to take a drive with source code to an office out of State. We would just make images of the drives and send the other office the images on CD but those boneheads would never figure out what to do with them. So we have to send the whole hard drive. We also have to send them IDE as they won't fork out for SCSI there.