Can you plug in and remove a normal SATA drive without powering down??
Obviously, not the OS/main drive...
if you are using a sata controller that supports it, and you are using the sata power cable, nor are you using the drive as a boot/main drive, then in theory it should be possible.
You can hot swap eSata drives, so in theory shouldn't you be able to hot swap regular sata drives?
After all, isn't it just a small difference in the connector design (ie designed so the cable "locks" into place)?
Can you plug in and remove a normal SATA drive without powering down??
This has been discussed many times in great detail.
Here is some interesting reading.
forum-search.cfm?s=723455&r=5523792
I do it all the time.
I use internal SATA racks, solves the connect/disconnect problem.
You also need chipsets that support hotswap, so far I can confirm NF3, NF4, NF430. Gigabyte SATA 3Gb/s Controller (I think this is actually a JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller)
Intel chipsets that support AHCI (with matrix raid software) are also claimed to support hotswap but I haven't tried these. I have heard that they may only truely support hotswap for RAID and not single SATA drives.
i do it with mine external racks
the way i see it is, if you disable the device in windows
then it will not be able to be used until its reconnected.
as it is not usable after this, no data will be written etc
so taking the drive out i think would have the same effect as shutting down the system
no data is being transfered, but the power is still on
or maybe im just wrong?
I've read from many users, depending on the controller, disabling the drive is not always a safe way to remove a drive. Drive disabling does not always clear the cache and buffers.
One person showed that the controller would not clear the cache until a proper shutdown sequence is performed, and during his trial he showed with several controllers 100s of files would be missing on the next installation of the disc. I think the process to prove it was to write ~1000 dummy files to the drive. Waited one hour, then performed the disable. Restore the drive and look for any missing files.
I would not say with certainty that all controllers will work with the disable method. I expect some could list which controllers work in this manner, but even then, drivers and bios can have an unpredictable influence.
The only true safe way to know you can hot swap depends on the drive showing up in the "Safely remove hardware" list.
I'm still struggling to find a way to get my Intel IHC8R to hot swap with individual drives. All documentation from Intel indicates hot swap is available, but in reality it is not as far as I can tell (except for hot swap of bad hard drives in RAID 1 and 5 arrays). I have yet to find one person that has hot swap working with individual drives any onboard Intel controller.
I just setup a hot-swap sata drive bay on an intel D865PERL. At first, it would not recognize the drive. In fact, if I turned off, then turned on the drive and tried to access the drive, it would reboot.
The BIOS didn't have settings to enable only AHCI, but it did have the RAID setting, which includes AHCI as well. Even though I have only a single drive on one SATA connector (the main drives are a RAID5 array on a PCI card), the hotswap now works.
I have a Vantec NexStar 3 with eSATA and USB, with a Seagate 320 GB drive in it. I hot-plug the eSATA port in and out all the time via the JMicron eSATA port on my Mobo. No problems in Windows XP at all.
The BIOS didn't have settings to enable only AHCI
That boards chipset (ICH5 or ICH5R doesn't support AHCI)
So how does the hotswap work?
Is there an icon in the task bar?
Are you just turning it on/off and windows detects it?
Do you get write behind cache errors when turning it off?
Yeah, I'm just not game to try.... Don't want to cook either my HDD or M/B..
or your hand, don't forget you will need to plug in and out the psu cable.
You need the right chipset. I've got nforce4 and in the system tray there's a icon for hot swapping SATA drive
Just recieved confirmation from Intel. Intel does NOT support hot-swap in any software release for any MB chipset released to the public.
Hot-swap is supported in various *NIX and Windows corporate server OSes, but not for the home user, with OSes such as WinXP.
I will have to get a hot-swap capable PCIe card or change over to a nVidia 680i based board.