IDE hotswap

[jonmullen]

I need a definative answer on if I can have IDE hotswap able drives with out a special controler card (apart from onboard RAID controller). If so what enclosures am I going to need. I have searched and I seem to find varying answers, most leading back to go SCSI, which is not an option. I would also prefere not to do firewire or USB 2. If it helps the OS is Linux, most likely RedHat 8

 

[Lord Evermore]

No, you can't do it without an appropriate controller card. The controller has to be capable, and you have to have the appropriate drivers loaded, so that the controller can detect and alert the OS to the removal, and treat it as a removed drive instead of a failure of some sort. It's doubtful that the onboard RAID controller is capable.

You do also need hot-swap capable enclosures.

I don't know specifically what brands do what, I think Promise makes a hot-swappable card, most likely Adaptec does too.

 

[jonmullen]

Yea, I knew about the need for hotswap enclosures. Since I am not going to have the OS on these disks, just the backup data that is done at night, will it not work to just turn the key to power donw the drive remove it and insert a indentical drive?

 

[thorin]

"will it not work to just turn the key to power donw the drive remove it and insert a indentical drive? "

It should, assuming you get a HS capable card and enclosure as discussed above.

Thorin

 

[Lord Evermore]

Just turning the key on the special enclosure will only remove power from the drive. The IDE controller and the OS, if they're not prepared for it, will detect that as a drive failure and react in whatever way they want to. For some people, that ends up being a crash, though I've heard of people whose Windows systems just locks up, and if they stick the drive back onto the IDE chain it starts working again. But you never know, and if you try it, you're risking the slight possibility of serious damage to the components at worst. And if you do happen to make it work in some jerry-rigged way, who knows if a driver upgrade or some other update might make it stop working without notice, until you try to do it again.

If it's that important to you to have an internal, hot-swappable drive, do it right. If you're just using it for backups, get a good firewire or USB2.0 enclosure, and stick a hard drive into it. Backups don't run so fast that they need the absolute full speed of the ATA/100 or whatever controller, because the indexing and compression (if you use it) slows down the actual data-rate a lot, unless your "backup" is just a file-copy operation.