Luke Yelavich <them...@themuso.com> writes: > 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.
It probably shouldn't. Hot-swap is a standard SATA feature. >> Should I assume that this means I can safely hot swap this drive as >> long as it's unmounted? Almost certainly. >> 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. No, he was right: you do have to have a suitable "motherboard" (really, SATA controller in the chipset), as well as a suitable driver, and a suitable SATA enclosure. It sounds like you have the last, most modern SATA controllers are suitable for the first ... and the driver, well, are reasonable. >> 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. That isn't quite right. AHCI had /driver/ support, and exposed enough hotplug information to the driver, that Linux got support for it early. Other hardware might be supported; see here: http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features If you do have an AHCI controller then, yes, it should be hotplug suitable and just work(tm). Meanwhile, eSATA is just a wiring standard on top of stock SATA, more or less, so it doesn't have much to do with AHCI, or vice-versa. [...] > I am no expert on this stuff, but this is from what I've read and done > with my own drives via E-Sata ports. You were more or less on target. :) Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
