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. 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. Hope this helps Luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
