[Eug-lug] Hot swap SATA

[Garl Grigsby]

Michael Miller wrote:
> As long as the RAID card supports HOT swapping drives you are fine.
> SCSI,SATA and SAS all support hot swapping or hot plugging drives.
> What connectors on the motherboard are you referring too?  Do you want
> to pull PCI cards while the system is up and running?  I've yet to see
> this done successfully on HP-UX hardware and Solaris Hardware as well.
> I don't know of any PCI cards that you can swap HOT under linux.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm talking about hot-swapping the SATA drives 
connected to the on motherboard connectors. Not the ones on the RAID 
card. Basically I have drives connected to the RAID card. These I'm 
fairly sure I can hot-swap if I place them in a cage. I also want to do 
backups to a e.SATA drive. This drive comes with a bracket that connects 
a e.SATA external connector to an internal SATA connector. I'm planning 
on plugging this into the SATA port on the motherboard. I just need to 
understand what I need to do to make the drive 'visible' to the OS once 
I've plugged it in. Will the OS 'see' it automagically or do I have to 
'scan' for it. If I do have to initiate something, then what? 
Documentation on this seems vague at best.
> When you pull the drive make sure it is unmounted.  Then remove the
> drive so that it is disconnected from the back plane of the drive
> cage.  Wait 3 or 4 minutes the drive should have stopped spinning
> after 2 minutes and then remove the drive.
Is this to prevent physical damage to the drive (spinning head + motion 
= bad)? I'm just asking because I have a nasty habit of unplugging a USB 
hard drive and just running with it (after unmounting it of course)
>
> Miller
>
> On 12/28/06, Garl Grigsby <badd_karma at comcast.net> wrote:
>> Michael Miller wrote:
>> > You should not have a issue with hot swapping as long as the hardware
>> > controller supports it.
>> Ok, now for the $10k question: How do you know? I know the raid card
>> supports it (I had to email several people to find out), but what about
>> the motherboard connectors?
>> > If you do have a issue with the drives not
>> > showing up in a dmesg. Then all you need too do is run a script that
>> > scans the SCSI bus.  Other than that you should not have any issues
>> > hot swapping drives.  I would caution you on ripping out drives that
>> > have not finished spinning down.  Not a good idea.
>> Ok, how to spin the drive down before you remove them?
>>
>> Garl
>>
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