how to make sata hdd swappable?

[leeroy]

how do i make a sata hdd 80gb maxtor hot swappable? so i can eject it?

also can i also eject the hdd via the system tray? wot happens if i eject the main os hdd? will the pc shut down will the os still run with the single hdd ejected?


another QS is i also intend to plug two 80gbs and mirror them, after this. if one fails. how will i actually recover the data? i just plug in a new blank hdd and then rebuild the raid right?

[ashmedai]

Hot-swap refers to the ability to physically remove (and re-insert) the drive and have the controller not have an aneurism over it.

If you unplug your system drive, bad things will happen, but not because of the drive electronics.

Mirroring's pretty pointless for home use. Drive failure with that few drives is relatively not much of an issue, whereas data loss due to software mishaps is relatively high. Mirroring won't help you significantly. Points for asking about RAID 1 instead of RAID 0 though. That is basically how you would rebuild it though, if you go ahead with it in spite of me. :D

Keep backups, screw the mirroring, your data will be several dozen times safer and you won't have wasted the price of another hard drive and can spend it on something that'll do you some good. (bigger drive instead, better speakers, pizza...)

[leeroy]

i just want to know, its wot my 30 grand customer wants :D

so how woould i go about repairing or so called re building the raid if one of the mirrored hard drives failed?

[ashmedai]

Plug in a new one, go in the controller software / controller BIOS (not system BIOS, although can be if it's onboard) and tell it to rebuild. Functionally it's just copying the drive and remembering that they're an array so it has to write to both from now on.

You might want to get a hot-swap cage, by Supermicro or several others, if it's a concern for them. That way you can un-jack it from the front instead of unscrewing the drive in the middle of a running system.

[Phonic]

Check out Intel Matrix RAID, it looks good.

[leeroy]

thx. during my testing. i mirroed two hdds,. installed xp pro. then i pulled out the power on one hdd so corrupt it.

but usually how would i know which hdd has failed? ie. shadowed or master drive

[ashmedai]

The controller should say what channel it is and then you can just look at the number & yank that one.

Or, if controller & cage are set up for it, you can rig it so the bad one has a flashing red LED or whatever...gotta figure out how to make my Supermicro cage & my RocketRaid 1820A get along one of these days. Not sure they can...2 pins on one, 1 pin on the other (per drive).

[ashmedai]

Oh yeah, and there's no "shadowed" and "master" drive, it writes to both and can read from both, it doesn't care which is which.

[hulksterjoe]

buy a simple hs bay.. takes 3 5-1/4 bays and make HS bays for sata out of them

something like this
http://www.3ware.com/products/ata.asp

The 3ware is a little pricey but there are ones that one use 2 bays and give you 3 hs bays

that cost less