SATA HotSwap

[imported_juanflaiter]

A friend of mine has the Asus A7N8X Deluxe MoBo, which comes with built in Silicon Image 3112A SATA Controller. Well he claims he has done Hotswap, with the Win XP "Remove hardware with security" (or something like that, although Asus repeats it´s not supported.

I have an Abit NF7-S v2.0, which comes with the first revision of that same controller the Silicon Image 3112, I´m wondering if I can do HotSwap. Any thoughts about this?

 

[alexXx]

SATA was built to be hotswapable wasnt it? the grounding connectors make contact first when you plug the power cable in, so i would think hotswapable would be a software issue if it doesnt work.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Hotswap is NOT available on either of those boards. Hes probably screwing up his harddrive. As for the eject drive i guess it is possible tho i highly recommend against it as there is a very high chance of something screwing up. Also if hes does it that way is drive is MUCH slower because you have to disable write caching and optimize for quick removal. hes probably screwed something up. I think some gigabyte boards and some new nvidia based boards have hotswap support.

-Kevin

 

[NightCrawler]

SATA 2 is suppose to officially support hot swap.

 

[MichaelZ]

hot swapability depends on the controller chip on the MB.

 

[imported_juanflaiter]

The controller chip in the Asus, the 3112A supports hot swap, although the mobo does not. Asus says the mobo doesnt support hot swap, but the sata controller chip manufacturer claims this ability. Who shall I believe in?

 

[Bar81]

To be able to hotswap both the SATA controller chip/southbridge and the mobo BIOS must support it.

 

[imported_juanflaiter]

Originally posted by: Bar81
To be able to hotswap both the SATA controller chip/southbridge and the mobo BIOS must support it.

nForce2 motherboards don´t have the SATA controller integrated in the southbridge, although the GB revision does. BTW there are no mobos with the GB at this time.

Thanks for your answers, it seems it´s not worth the try.

 

[Peter]

Doesn't matter. The SATA interface chip (on the mainboard or PCI card) may or may not support hot plugging drives - the cabling, plugs, and controllers (which are in the DRIVES, remember?) must support it, else they're not SATA compliant.

Now if the SATA interface chip supports it, and its drivers actually allow it, then it'll work. Pitfalls are numerous, e.g. WXP allows hot plugging an individual drive from a stripe RAID pair. Bye bye data ...