Luke Yelavich wrote:
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:58:14PM EST, david wrote:
I've just installed a sata hard drive bay for a second drive, the kind
that has a little front door so you can slip the drive in and out.
The point of installing it was to make it easy to change drives when
doing backups, but I had assumed that I would have to shut down before
taking the drive in or out.
When I unmount it, Gnome announces that I can now remove the media, which
surprised me a bit. Should I assume that this means I can safely hot swap
this drive as long as it's unmounted? The nice man in the shop assured me
that I needed all sorts of mobo magic to be able to do that, but of
course he was talking Windows. I would hate to splat 500G of backup.
As far as I am aware, new SATA standards, such as AHCI, allow the hot
plugging of drives/cables, in fact without AHCI, machines wouldn't be able to
offer E-Sata ports.
I would check the type of connection for the drive and the rack that you
mount it in. Since its new, I'd say it will be SATA, however you will have
to find out whether the rack itself supports hot-plugging of drives, due to
how the power to the drive is managed, as well as whether the controller on
the motherboard supports AHCI, and if so, whether its running in AHCI mode.
It's certainly a SATA drive and connection.
I don't know how to check if the drive bay or my system supports AHCI. It's a
Vantec MRK-100ST-BK and the only info I can find says "Device supports SATA
I/II, internal interface SATA I/II requires Windows 98SE --> Vista, or MacOS,
requires SATA equipped system." Nothing about AHCI. Nothing about hot swapping.
Google gives me plenty of places to buy it, but no hard information. There is a
vantec website but this product isn't listed, although a later model is listed :(
While on the subject, Ubuntu used to have a convenient little applet that gave a
list of installed hardware. It seems to have vanished. Does anyone know what it
was called and whether it still exists?
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