2TB Drive Won't Hot Swap

T

theTIK

Gawd
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Months ago I installed a mobile rack in my rig(computer in sig) and I love it. I have been hot-swapping sata drives to easily share large amounts of data with my friend who also has a mobile rack on his computer.

I recently just purchased a Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB drive and it works fine but it will not hot-swap. The manual for the drive says it does support hot plugging. When I plug it in windows 7 does not add it at all, nor does it show in device manager. It is already formatted and has data on it. If I leave it plugged in and reboot, windows recognizes it fine.

I have never had this problem before, every drive I have tried until now has hot-plugged just fine. This is the first 2TB drive I am trying, is it possible that the sector size has something to do with this? Can anyone give me some insight as to how to fix this?
 
I just checked and the sector size for this drive is 512. So the sector size should not be the issue. Any ideas?
 
Do you have AHCI enabled in the BIOS? It should be for hotswap to work.

Are all the drives on the same controller?
 
Old Hippie said:
Do you have AHCI enabled in the BIOS? It should be for hotswap to work.

Are all the drives on the same controller?
Click to expand...

Yes AHCI has been enabled since the windows install, there are two sata controllers on the motherboard so not all drives are on the same control but this shouldn't matter. I have already been able to hot-swap with the system, using the exact same sata port I am trying to use now, this is the port my mobile rack is connected to. Every drive I have ever tried has successfully hot-swapped except for this one.
 
AFAIK any SATA drive should hotswap when the controller supports it.

Hopefully someone else will come along with a trick for ya. :)
 
The only thing that comes to mind that I've seen regarding those drives is someone mentioned the drive would disappear after coming out of sleep mode and the only fix (other than to reboot), was to install the Intel Matrix Console stuff, which made no logical sense to him, but it fixed his problem.

Other option, the drive firmware is bugged somehow.
 
There's a Windows hotfix for drives not showing up after the PC comes out of sleep. Not sure if it would address your problem.
 
danman said:
There's a Windows hotfix for drives not showing up after the PC comes out of sleep. Not sure if it would address your problem.
Click to expand...

That isn't the problem, my computer never sleeps. I think is must be any issue with the drive itself. Since every other sata drive I have tried has worked.
 
I am having the same problem, I bought 2 ST32000542AS and a StarTech 5.25 SATA hot swap drive bay. This allows me to put a drive in hot because I am using AHCI. This was now going to be my backup solution. What I have found is that I will put a drive in, I will hear it spin up but then nothing shows in My Computer I have waited 5 minutes and still noting. What's odd is that if I pull the SATA cable off the back only the data cable not the power off the hot swap bay and plug it back in, there is my drive it pops right up. So after testing with other drives they show up fine using this hot swap bay. Only the Seagate drives do not work. I have also tested with my external Vantec eSATA dock with the same result it wont work unless after the drive spins up I unplug and replug in the SATA cable then it pops right up. So I have chalked this up to a Firmware issue on the drive. The drive does not power up properly before starting the data partition maybe. I have even noticed that i am running firmware version CC34 on the drive and version CC35 is available but neither the Windows firmware tool works nor the bootable ISO work both error out. I cannot get my firmware updated! SO I am at a loss here. I will be contacting Seagate on Monday to see what the heck is going on. Its not my bay because I have tested 2 different ones and both can use other drives with no issue, as well the drive will show up if after they are powered up and I unplug and replug in the SATA cable. FYI I have even updated my MB BIOS to the latest, I am Running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, 4 GB of RAM and I am an IT professional so I know most of the tricks to getting stuff to work, stuff like unpuging all other drives other then this on etc.

This is for sure a strange one. Here are the links I have found for this

Product Page: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...a90b0210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&locale=en-US

Firmware Download page: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=213915&NewLang=en

Seagate Tools: for checking firmware version etc: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

I hope some one else has some ideas or else these drives are going back for different ones.
 
When I ran into this sort of thing it was the controller on the motherboard holding it back from hot swapping.

If there was a drive connected on boot you could remove and add drives no problem. If there was no drive on boot the BIOS would shut off the port. There was an option to configure the port as removable in the BIOS but if there wasn't a drive there on boot it would add like a minute or two to POST time, but it would work right and you could add a drive later on.

Basically you want eSATA to hot swap.
 
Thing is all other drives then the ST32000542AS drive hot swap so BIOS supports it 100% but just not for this model of drive even other Seagate drives work. As I mentioned if I wait for the drive to spin up first then unplug and replug back in the SATA cable the drive pops up in Windows auto play feature. So again the system sees it and will hot swap it but it seems the drive needs to spin all the way up first before plugging in the SATA cable. It has to be a firmware issue with the drive that just does not wait long enough for the drive to spin up before opening the data channel for communications.

I have a ticket into Seagate so we will see what they say!
 
Oh, I missed that. That's just a spinup timeout then. As a longshot check into the spinup delay in BIOS. Unlikely to help as that's only on POST I do believe.
 
Yeah you got it is only for post and normally only for SCSI drives as they need a lot of power to spin up to 12K and if you have 5 of them all doing that at the same time your power supply can blow its fuse as the initial power surge can be 3 times as much as the running usage of the drive. Ill have a look but I don't believe this option is available in a non SCSI BIOS
 
LOL first response I got from Seagate. If you read the SPEC of SATA 1.0 it says it must have differed length pins to allow for hot swapping.. any ways here is the answer


Dear Caspan,

Thank you for contacting Seagate.

Unfortunately, Barracuda drives, like most SATA drives, are not hot-swappable. Doing so can damage a standard SATA drive. SAS, FC, and SCA types of drives are hot-swappable due to the design of the power/data connections.

Regards,

ERIC
Seagate Global Customer Support
 
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2 seconds later I got this one.. I love how they actually read my statements


Dear Caspan,

Thank you for contacting Seagate.

The drive you have is capable of hot swapping, however we do not support it. You say the drive hot swaps when used with an external dock, but not with the internal dock would indicate something isn't quite right with the internal dock's settings. I would contact the internal dock's support.


Regards,

Jeff
Seagate Global Customer Support
 
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so now I called in and I got the answer that Seagate officially does not support hot swap on any other drives then the Cheetah if it works it work if it don't it don't. Well Seagate if I ever buy a drive from you again I might if I don't I don't. Who the heck does not support hot swapping on their drives? This is ridiculous!!! So i sent those drives back. I went to Canada Computers and I bought 2 WD WD20EARS-00MVWB0 drives for $89 and asked "Are theses hot swappable" i get yes. I checked their FAQ and yes they are. I bring them home and low and behold they are not hot swappable. I have tested on 2 different computers one a laptop with eSATA and one with internal drive cage. so 2 different computers, 2 different docks, WTF is going on here??? Does windows 7 x64 have an issues with these drives?

Am I the only one here with 2 TB drives I need to hot swap? I would love to know what others are doing? I am using RAW drives no cases!
 
I have been hot swapping four 2tb seagate 5900rpm drives for a while now with no issues. On an eSATA chipset though.
 
What do you mean on an eSATA chipset? SATA is the same as eSATA just a different connector. Are these internal raw drives you are swapping in and out or are these in their own external cases and run through eSATA and need an external power source.

As well what OS are you running?

I'm staring to think this is a Windows 7 x64 issue. I'm going to be calling MS to have them look at it. 4 different drives all acting the same from 2 different manufacturers, 2 different laptops one Intel one AMD, 2 different docks one powered of system one external. This is starting to dwindle down to be an OS issue!

Man this is frustrating, as an IT administrator this blows my mind how something like this can happen whether it is the disk or the OS, this is sad. I feel sorry for normal people that don't have the resources like me or the patience and just lets crap be crap. This is the worst fail other then Adobe I have seen in my career!

Ill keep every one updated! I will also be opening up a post on my blog for this. I think people need to be accountable for their mistakes and I'm painting a billboard :)
 
Problem solved...... Man this was a pain! I'm lucky I didn't pay the $250 for MS support. I found this KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178 this states that some green drives (which these all are) could have a problem because they take longer then the standard 10 seconds to spin up because they conserve power. So it could take them from 10-20 seconds to spin up. By applying this hotfix it prolongs the period that the system waits for the drives to spin up. So far I have tested this on my work laptop and tonight I will be testing it on my home machine. After that I will give it a clean bill of heath as the final working answer. I have also posted my story at my blog. Please leave a comment there if this also fixes your issue. You don't have to login to leave a comment and it will let others know this is the solution that works!

Here is a link to the blog http://caspan.com/?p=195

Thanks All!
 
eh, that's what I was referring to in my post a month ago. I guess I should have posted the KB and saved you some time.
 
Hh man I read this but didn't think twick about it because you mentioned comming out of sleep. Now -m putting 2 and 2 togeather! Thanks
 
Caspan said:
What do you mean on an eSATA chipset? SATA is the same as eSATA just a different connector. Are these internal raw drives you are swapping in and out or are these in their own external cases and run through eSATA and need an external power source.
Click to expand...

Not exactly; my post #10 above. Internal ports don't have to behave like eSATA.

As well what OS are you running?
Click to expand...

Win7 x64 machine in my sig. Before it was on a motherboard that didn't have eSATA and it was a royal pain in the ass to hot swap drives on that motherboard.

I looked and I don't seem to have that hotfix.
 
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