Adrian Chadd <[email protected]> writes:
> On Sat, May 16, 2009, Grahame Kelly wrote:
[...]
>> >FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than
>> >8mm of coverage for those connections. Just sayin'
>>
>> SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot-
>> swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level.
>
> Its optional. And it is not always implemented correctly.
Hot-swap is mandatory in the SATA spec, but not all controller chips
report it in a meaningful way to the OS. Unfortunately, while they
(theoretically) have to support the operation no one told their
interface designers about that.[1]
> I have some notes somewhere from some previous experiments with
> various desktop-y SATA chipsets under FreeBSD/Linux and I found that
> they didn't all do hotswap as advertised. ;)
*nod* Likewise, Linux was a lot more troublesome. The OP has recent
enough hardware that his life is fine, if he is using the ICH7 in AHCI
mode though. Lucky him, and lucky the rest of us now that hotplug is
pretty much a standard feature.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] ...well, in fairness, a bunch of the early hardware was just a PATA
controller with a SATA bridge plugged in, or operated in a mode
that looked just like a PATA controller with no hot-plug support.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
