Hot-swappable IDE hard drive racks - How well do they work?

[RaiderJ]

Do hot-swappable IDE hard drive racks exist? I've seen a few advertised, but I can't get any information on how well they work. I have a couple racks that need a reboot in order for the drives to be recognized, which I'd like to avoid if possible.

So, do they exist, and how well do they work?

 

[RalfHutter]

They don't work because IDE is not hot-swappable, no matter what those vendors will try and tell you. Promise makes (made?) a controller card that will let you hotswap IDE but that's only because the card is doing the job, not the MoBo/OS.

 

[GGabus]

Adaptec (2400a) also supports hot-swap. Have seen some backplanes that support it too but are brand specific ie: maxtor, or WD etc.

 

[foxkm]

Originally posted by: RalfHutter
They don't work because IDE is not hot-swappable, no matter what those vendors will try and tell you. Promise makes (made?) a controller card that will let you hotswap IDE but that's only because the card is doing the job, not the MoBo/OS.

IDE is totally hot swapple. I do it all the time. Win2k/XP works great for swapping IDE drives (Cdrom and Hard drives)
Just make sure you go and "uninstall" the drive in device manager under disk drive to tell Windows its not there before you do. Then you can simply unplug the drive and put a new one in. You will have to tell device manager to detect new hardware to pick up the new drive.

It's usually a good idea to turn off write caching on the drive if you plan to make a practice of this.

-foxkm-