Hot Swap SATA question

[LobsterSan]

I just got myself a hot swap dock for SATA drives, and I'm wondering if there are any precautions I should take before swapping out the drive live? I'm a bit skeptical about doing so, and don't want to fry my board or my drive, lose buffered data, or corrupt the data I just transferred to it.

I'm running Windows XP Home, and haven't been able to find much information for doing so properly. Is there some sort of chipset driver I should install in order to properly prepare the drive for a live swap?

 

[Grentz]

Is the dock USB? SATA? eSATA?

You have to have AHCI mode enabled to hotswap SATA drives if they are connecting via SATA or eSATA.

Note that AHCI mode also requires drivers to be installed for your OS so do not just turn it on in the BIOS if it is not already as it will just give you blue screens.

 

[LobsterSan]

It's a SATA dock that has been installed into a 5.25" drive bay in my case, and is directly connected to my motherboard.

Thanks you for that -- I'll take a look around for AHCI drivers.

BTW, my motherboard is an ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe

 

[LobsterSan]

Alright, apparently the AHCI format is proprietary to intel chips, and the ASUS A8N has an nForce4 chip on it. It uses a different protocol.

All I had to do was update my nForce4 chipset drivers and my SATA drives now show up in the task menu hardware removal utility.