Hot swap SATA

hardware_failure

hardware_failure

[H]ard|Gawd
2FA
Joined
Mar 21, 2008
Messages
1,783
I have a system thats mirriored to internal drives (software raid 1)

I wish to add a hot swap bay (have open 5.25 bays) so that I can easily hot swap sata drives, and do a file sync/backup to the drive nightly.

MB is a ECS G31T-M7.

Thanks for any help.
 
You should make sure your SATA controller is in AHCI mode. If your SATA controller is in IDE mode, changing it to AHCI will prevent Windows from starting. There are some registry entries to add/modify which should enable your computer to boot in AHCI mode. Otherwise there's not too much more you need to do.
 
Thank you for the response. The board does boot and run in AHCI.

What do people think about a product like this ?:
Trayless Hot Swap

Running windows server 2k3....
Would I have to manually "safely remove" or "offline" (in disk management) the hotswap drives at all?

Thanks.
 
for whatever reason I get BSODs on one of my rigs even with AHCI enabled... when i insert a new drive, i gave up on eSATA and hotswap and bought a USB3.0 card and dock and it works great and it is super fast

good luck to you
 
Adidas4275 said:
for whatever reason I get BSODs on one of my rigs even with AHCI enabled... when i insert a new drive, i gave up on eSATA and hotswap and bought a USB3.0 card and dock and it works great and it is super fast

good luck to you
Click to expand...

This happened to me when I had all 5 permanent drives and the drives I swapped in on the same power cable from my modular power supply. I used extenders and adapters and plugged in only one modular power cable to my power supply. I think the new drive was just drawing too much current. The BSODs went away when I split the drives across several modular cables.
 
hardware_failure said:
Thank you for the response. The board does boot and run in AHCI.

What do people think about a product like this ?:
Trayless Hot Swap

Running windows server 2k3....
Would I have to manually "safely remove" or "offline" (in disk management) the hotswap drives at all?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
I would always "safely remove" drives just to be on the safe side. I use a program called Hot Swap!
 
Thanks for all the great feedback.

I have read about the HotSwap! utility but have not used it yet.

I am a bit curious about swapping via USB 3.0 as Adidas4275 mentioned.

USB 2.0 is a bit slow, but the ease and simplicity of "hot swapping" such devices leaves much to be desired. I too have had a bit of mixed (at best) results with eSATA on different systems.

Does anyone know of an INTERNAL USB 3.0 SATA bay? (just like the newegg link above) Sounds like the best of both worlds and exactly what I want. Id be more than willing to buy a card for it.

Thanks again.
 
Last edited:
FYI, I've had 0 issues with swapping eSATA on my home PC (X58) or my work laptop (Dell E6500, ICH10 I think). I have an external 3.5" enclosure I use at home, an Iomega external drive at work, and a combo-eSATA/USB adapter for 2.5" drives that I use for temporary testing (everything from standard laptop HDDs to SATA SSDs to the 1GB SSDs that come in our FX160 thin clients). I also use HotSwap! to make sure everything is "disconnected" before unplugging it.


Michael Scarn said:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993031&cm_re=snt-_-17-993-031-_-Product

I'd grab a few of those. For the price, I was absolutely shocked by how simple and nice they were. Great if you only need one or two.
Click to expand...

How's the "80mm turbo cooling fan" in that? It looks like a decent item for the price, but my first assumption would be that the fan would be a loud cheapy.
 
InvisiBill said:
How's the "80mm turbo cooling fan" in that? It looks like a decent item for the price, but my first assumption would be that the fan would be a loud cheapy.
Click to expand...

It's quiet as far as I can tell, though I practically have a wind channel running through my processor and out the back that I hear above all else. I haven't noticed the drive in the hotswap get any hotter than a few degrees C above the case's interal drive bays. I kinda wish I could buy just the hard drive container part of the bay, because I have three hard drives I would swap out at any time, but have no use for all of them at the same time.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top