IDE hard drives are not hot-swappable because...?

[TechnoPro]

No, this is not for homework or anything of the sort.

I was in a class today and the instructor reffered to hard drives as plug and play. He elaborated by saying that Windows did not need special drivers to "see" IDE hard drives. Fair enough.

He then went on to say that one could plug a new hard drive in when the machine was turned on.

Instant WTF? moment for me.

I immediatetly challenged the validity of his statement, telling him that while SCSI, SATA, and USB hard drives can be hot-swapped, IDE / PATA drives cannot.

Am I wrong here?

 

[gsaldivar]

I immediatetly challenged the validity of his statement, telling him that while SCSI, SATA, and USB hard drives can be hot-swapped, IDE / PATA drives cannot.

I used to do it all the time with SCSI drives, but never tried it with IDE...

 

[johnjkr1]

IDE drives are not hot swappable. It is not part of the specification and most IDE drivers are not capable of handling it. There are backplanes and boxes that can convert IDE drives to hot swappable however, but most are part of servers are just use USB or firewire.

 

[Bleep]

link

IDE doesn't handle hot swapping at all. Sure, it may work for you, if your IDE driver is compiled as a module (only possible in the 2.2 series of the kernel), and you re-load it after you've replaced the drive. But you may just as well end up with a fried IDE controller, and you'll be looking at a lot more down-time than just the time it would have taken to replace the drive on a downed system.
Ripped from the above link

Bleep

 

[xenos500]

I have done it a few times....

I hooked it up with the system on and in windows, then went to device manager and right clicked on the root item and selected "scan for hardware changes"
Right after that my seagate 7200.7 was detected and worked fine.

I have done it twice with that seagate and once with an IBM 60GXP

No problems, I learned the trick from messing with scsi hotswap drives.
I dont do it with IDE unless Im really lazy. I wouldnt suggest doing it, but you might have luck and get it to work like me.


your instructor seems kind of dumb
so are all the instructors in any computer class I have ever taken.

 

[BFG10K]

The general rule is to not hot-swap anything unless it was specifically designed to do so (eg USB, Firewire). Otherwise you can simply fry your entire machine.

 

[Mday]

existing "IDE" (parallel ata) hard drive drivers are not designed for hot plugging or hot swapping. you have to detect the drive again manually (see posts above)

furthermore, the parallel ata specification does not allow for hot swapping. the interconnect and pinout does not allow any margin of safey or design considerations for hot swapping. There are no established guidelines in the ata specifications for the separation of power, signal and ground for ata drives allowing ofr hot swapping implementations. besides, ata drives are "cheap" hot swappability is a feature found in more expensive set ups simply because there are things to consider when hot swapping that is not considered for simple fixed drives.

serial ata, however, does implement hot swappability.

 

[jagec]

Interestingly enough, some people have damaged their motherboards by plugging in PS/2 kb's with the computers plugged in, but not turned on.

Doesn't happen often...heavens knows I've plugged in my share of keyboards with the computer still plugged in...but actually is a risk.

Supposedly you should always unplug/switch off the power supply first.