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Hardware Software Linux

Hot-Swapping IDE Drives? 122

Posted by Cliff from the swapping-like-floppies dept.
Patman asks: "I've recently taken a new job where I'll need to be making drive images and such for quite a few IDE drives - say a few a day. I need the ability to 'hot-swap' IDE drives into a running Linux or Windows system. The systems that I'm using are fairly standard IBM desktop PCs, I've found references on Google to IDE->USB converter cables and IDE->USB converter boxes. Does anyone have experience with those? Some come with drivers for Windows - has anyone used them under Linux? Does the mass storage USB code deal with them accurately? Barring that, does anyone have any other ideas? External hot-swapping would be ideal, although an internal solution would be doable, too."
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Hot-Swapping IDE Drives? More

Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?

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  • Delayed write bug in Win2k (Score:5, Informative)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) * on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @08:50AM (#7972138) Homepage Journal
    There seems to be a deep seated bug in Windows 2000 server when it comes to delayed writes and USB. The USB spec calls for a maximum transfer of 128k, but Win2k attempts a 512k trasfer after it's cached up a few writes, which results in "Delayed Write Failure", and lost files.

    I can't seem to find any fix, the driver software doesn't permit caching to be disabled in the advanced properties box, so it's rendered an otherwise fine 120 GB Western Digital drive as an expensive paper weight, at least as far as Windows is concerned.

    From what I've been able to read, it appears that Linux knows better, and respects the 128k per packet limit, and doesn't have this issue, but I've not confirmed that yet.

    It's a bitch to be doing a backup (using copy) of 45 Gb of photos, and lose a few along the way.

    --Mike--

    • Does this affect 2k pro as well? The reason I ask is that we recently went through a host of backup solutions for small businesses, trying to find something that worked well and was inexpensive.

      Zips are too small for alot of business while tapes are too expensive, slow, and have issues.

      We really aren't looking for a solution that can handle MASSIVE transfers. If it maxed out at 20-40gb that would be just fine.

      In any case we finally settled on usb enclosures. The enclosures had no ventilation so I was
      • I could be wrong, but by my understanding is that there's no such thing as a "true 40gb usb drive(s)" - the actual drives being made today either have (S/P)ATA, SCSI or FC as their interface/communication spec, and even the "true" usb drives are just simply IDE drives in a usb enclosure.

        Of course, the units sold as USB drives are engineered for a specific drive to work with a specific enclosure so hopefully they'll avoid the issues you discuss through some other means (such as a proprietary driver that fix
      • 2000 Professional and Server are the exact same thing

        Forget drivers... the only difference is the productID when installing. The install CD contains the exact same files, and the service packs are exactly the same. Hell, they even use the same kernel binary.
        It just artificially limits the number of CPUs and RAM.

        So whatever is true for Professional will automatically be true for Server, and vice versa.

        You should really be looking at something centralized like Retrospect (which isn't too expensive, unlimi

        • Professional and Server are slightly different. While yes, there's just a bunch of tweaking parameters in the registry, and some other parameters which control special licensing, at the simplest level there are packages which simply do not exist in Professional which exist in Server e.g. Active Directory, IIS, Message Queueing, stuff like that.

          For the purpose of drivers and hardware support, yeah, they're identical.

          BTW, some packages artificially impose licensing restrictions depending on whether you'r

          • Yeah, there is the whole "check WindowsVersion" thing, which can be easily circumvented for stuff like Partition magic.
            [tuwien.ac.at]
            NTSwitch... it can turn Pro into Server without issue.
            Also of note, it apparently turns XP into an incomplete beta of .NET server (no seriously, try it, you can always switch back)
            And as for the install CDs, well maybe you're right about the packages' presence on the disk. But it really is the only difference. All you have to do is run the change tool, pop in the 2k server CD, and install
          • nope, it's true... in fact, some pirating groups found this out, and they made a bootable cd that boots a linux shell, maps the files depeneding on which you want to install, and continues booting the cd.... its (as my roommate calls it) tits being able to install any version of win2k (and now they have one for winxp) from one cd...
        • There are definitely some differences beyond the product ID. One example that comes to mind is ATI video drivers. It took a registry hack to get the display drivers for a Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder to work properly on 2000 Advanced Server, and I never managed to get the video capture working. Further registry hacking might've gotten it working, but I just switched the box to Pro since there was no actual reason for it to be running Server.
          • You know, "kernel personality". But they are embedded in the same set of exes, dlls, vxds and sys files. It's like when you enable smp/ioapic and bigmem in linux from grub.

            The driver is making an incorrect assumption (probably about per-cpu locks or something). In fact, it might be a good way to weed out bad drivers, switching mode to Advanced Server and seeing what sticks.

            I've always had trouble with ATI's drivers, especially video capture stuff on anything but a single-cpu system running 98.

    • Re:Delayed write bug in Win2k (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @10:36AM (#7973012) Homepage
      I have 2 seperate dual USB 2 and Firewire cases, and both drop files, has bus time outs, locks the bus or the whole machine...under Linux using EXT2!

      This only happens on large transfers (say dd of a 5 or 20gb drive, or cp of the files). Small files or copying one a small number of files works fine. The drives I use are from Maxtor; 1 120gb, and another 40gb.

      Really #@#@$ me off. If anyone has encountered this with the 2.4.22 and earlier kernels and knows a fix (even if "move to 2.6.x") I'd appreciate knowing it!

      1. It can't be the drives since I've used different ones (unless Maxtors have some generic problem).

        It can't be the bus since I've used USB, USB 2, and Firewire.

        It can't be the chipset since the two cases use different chipsets from different manufactureres (and yes, I checked that they were supported before purchase).

        It can't be the machine itself since I've tried connecting it to a couple different systems (all Intel, one Celeron 1.4g desktop, another PIII 500 laptop).

        Tried formatting the drives in the external case, and reformatting them in the desktop first.

      • Does anyone have the same problems? Solutions? Very very curious!
        • Read this thread: thread over at Anandtech [anandtech.com]. The problem reports start on the 2nd page. You could try disassembling your USB enclosure to check the chipset temperature. If it is really hot, try cooling it and seeing if it fixes the problem. If so, bad equipment.
      • I see similar problems here with a Western Digital 250GB Dual USB2.0/Firewire drive under Slackware 9.1 with the stock 2.4.23 kernel.

        The strangest thing I see is that the drive seems to disconnect from the USB bus, and then reconnects around 2 seconds later. I have still to work out if this is caused by a hardware problem with the drive, with the motherboard (an Abit AT7-MAX), or with the kernel.

        I also see timeouts, failed sector reads/writes, and other errors from the SCSI Subsystem. These only see
      • With a WD 120 gig drive in an ADSTech external USB2 case (based on the Cypress ISD-300A chipset), connected to 98se, I've experienced the same issues.

        Every once in a while, the drive will spin down most of the way then spin back up, down and up, click click, down and up, and the system will complain that I removed the volume while it was in use. This sometimes happens almost continuously, and sometimes it'll behave perfectly for hours without a problem.

        Then something even weirder happened: Before formatti
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've had the exact same problem with Maxtor drives... under Mac OS X!

        I RMA'ed the first drive, the replacement worked when I first got it, but a couple weeks later the problem re-occurred. Basically I was using the external drive as a backup so wasn't using it very frequently.

        Same problem - the backup would copy 50-100MB until it hit large file, then would simply hang and not write any more data to the drive - would have to power it off and back on.
    • I've hotswapped IDE-disks dozens of times.

      1. Run Sync.exe (i'm sure you'll find it at download.com or something)
      2. Remove/disable the device in Device Manager (right click My Computer, Manage).
      3. Now disconnect your drive.
      4. Connect a new IDE drive.
      5. Go search for new hardware and it pops up.
    • I had the same problem with two Oxford 911 based Firewire enclosures. Terribly frustrating, though I only lost a few files to it... But I found when I put a 120GB WD 7200RPM "special edition" drive in it, the problems went away. Runs terribly hot though.
    • Im useing win2k server with a usb2.0 card some ME-320 series external ide drive enclosures and dantz retrospect.

      Works very well. Ive needed the backups a few times so its tested ok for me too. I haven't overloaded it to see how much a day I could push but my backup strategy is sufficient for now.
    • I have an external 5.25" USB cage sitting here, the only ID for which is a product code and "Made in China". It currently houses a Pioneer DVD burner (+/-RW, which works at full blast) but fitted with a cheapo 5.25" removable tray for 3.5" drives it also works fine with 80 and 120GB 7200 RPM Seagates.

      The only odd thing it does it throws an I/O error at the start of a burn (I've only ever used k3b with this drive) but k3b says it's OK and the burn always verifies. I've never burnt a coaster on it.

      I normall

  • Firewire (Score:3, Insightful)

    by selacious ( 101257 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @08:50AM (#7972139)
    Grab a IEEE1394 IDE bridge, preferably bus powered. Linux should support these devices and they are easily, externally hot-swappable. I've had success with the SuperDriveDock from Wiebetech [wiebetech.com], although there are certainly cheaper models out there [google.com].

    • Re:Firewire (Score:2, Informative)

      by rf600r ( 236081 )
      I'm here to second the FireWire proposal. Be sure you get a controller with an Oxford 9xx chipset and go to it. OtherWorld Computing [macsales.com] has some great enclosures, decent prices and good customer service.
    • I've used the ADS Pyro 1394/firewire enclosures (sold at retailers like CompUSA) with good results under Linux (usually Mandrake) and Windows 2k Pro and XP Pro. I've used it for fairly large backups under all of those OS's and haven't had any issues with dropped files or errors. You don't need any special drivers... but you may have to compile your kernel or enable the 1394 modules under other versions of Linux.
      I've also had a smaller external 1394 drive that held a laptop IDE HD, and would run from either
    • I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that I have a Sony Vaio laptop (they may or may not use a standard ieee1394, for their i.link) or if firewire support is just jacked on Linux. But everytime i boot my computer, I have to run a stupid script [linux1394.org] to re-detect it. In addition it drop's off and drops back on all the time that kudzu doesn't even know what to do with itself anymore. This is all on a docking station that I never use to remove. However, it's gotten to the point where I just gave up and switched t

  • I tried that once.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Louis Guerin ( 728805 ) <guerin@NOspaM.gmx.net> on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @08:57AM (#7972187)
    Hot-swapping an IDE HDD on my winXP box. Not sure what I was thinking, but I burned two HDDs and a motherboard doing it...

    Oh, you mean WITHOUT destroying your system? Sorry, can't help you...

    L

    • Re:I tried that once.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @09:02AM (#7972225)
      I've hot-swapped (both add and remove) IDE interface drives in WinXP with no problem.

      My guess is you removed the data cable before removing the power.

      Procedure to Remove Fixed Hard Disks:
      1. Remove Power Cable from Drive
      2. Remove Data Cable from Drive
      3. Scan for Hardware Changes in Device Manager.

      No data loss will occur as long as no open file handles are present on the disk at the time of removal. Windows XP will detect and gracefully dismount/remove references to it. If there are open file handles, data in the write cache will be lost, and WinXP will freeze up for a few minutes while waiting for the IDE timeout.

      Procedure to Add a Fixed Disk:
      1. Connect Data Cable
      2. Connect Power Cable
      3. Scan for Hardware Changes in Device Manager

      Windows will read the drive signature and make it available under My Computer.
      • If there are open file handles, data in the write cache will be lost, and WinXP will freeze up for a few minutes while waiting for the IDE timeout.

        IMHO, removing or disabling the drive from device manager should ensure you have no open files and flush the cache.

        • Well, that's why you don't work at Microsoft. People like you would reduce their profit margin. The average joe doesn't care if his files get lost now and then - what he really wants is more streaming video from his dialup connection.

          And supposing Windows did close any open files and flush the cache.... Why would anyone buy an upgrade?

          Honestly, those people who write perfect code don't write it for long. How many programmers have been put out of work by writing code that worked the first time, onl

          • If there aren't bugs in your code, you'll literally write yourself out of the market.

            Or you could try selling your software as a subscription service...

            And all of a sudden, it starts to make sense. :-)

            • You mean like the big boys in the enterprise market? Like IBM, which sells multimillion-dollar mainframes and charges fees upwards of 100,000 per year to license the operating system?

              On one hand, I'm glad that Microsoft hasn't figured this out - I don't feel like paying a yearly fee just to use my own hardware. But let's face it - Microsoft has been literally giving away the company when it comes to enterprise contracts - they sell licenses rather than lease them. Had IBM sold software, I doubt they

      • Are you really suggesting this is a good idea?

        There's a high chance that it'll work, but it still seems to me that unless a drive is designed for hot swapping, unplugging it from a running system has the chance of killing it.
        • There is only a small chance of losing data.. Unplugging an IDE hard drive from a working system is no different than having a power outage. Before I got a UPS, I had power outages all the time and never lost any data. All that will happen is Windows XP will freeze up for a few minutes, then you will get a notification of unsafe removal of device.

          If you plug a hard drive into a working system, however, I have gotten unpredictable results.

          I have had good luck with the USB drives mentioned earlier.. Most

      • Re:I tried that once.... (Score:5, Informative)

        by schapman ( 703722 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @01:09PM (#7974662)
        theres a reason not to do this... If you look at SATA, one of the reasons its safe to hot-swap is that on the power connector, the pins are different lengths. This way, when u connect/disconnect, you wont have shorts happening. I think its the ground connector on the power cable that connects first, disconnects last... Old school PATA devices dont have this, so every time you connect/disconnect while running... you have the risk of shorting and blowing your drive/MB
        • Old school PATA devices dont have this, so every time you connect/disconnect while running... you have the risk of shorting and blowing your drive/MB

          Just how does a data connection making/breaking contact before a power connection cause a short? It's not like the power gets shunted to a data line or ground in such a scenario.

          Actually, what often happens is that if a drive isn't connected to ground, it can transmit signals at unexpected voltage levels onto the bus. Nothing that should fry anything, but i

          • Not sure if it shorts it out per say, but I've connected power cables a lot in running systems. Half of the time it works fine, and half the time the power supply will just shut itself down and you have to wait a few minutes to turn the computer back on.
          • actually what i've heard is that when removing the PATA type power cable its possible to have one of the volatge lines disconnect while the other is connected (e.g. 12v connected while 5v gets disconnected) this could potentially do something like force 12v down a line which would otherwise be balanced by the 5v line thereby burning something. dont know the accurracy of it (read it somewhere). anyway i used to this and never had any serious problem other than losing a few files when i forget to unmount th

          • Funny thing about those Molex connectors: when you turn them upside-down, they don't insert fully (of course), but they go far enough (by tilting downward slightly) that the pins can make contact. And since one side of the plug is 5v while the other side is 12v, connecting it upside-down means that the electronics get force-fed over twice as much current as they were meant to take.

            If the lighting happens to be dim and you can't see which way the plug is oriented... yeah. I fried an 80GB Seagate Barrac

    • I have tried this more than once on my Win2k box with no problems. I have no idea why this works on my computer, but on nobody else's.

      Just make sure you unplug the power cable first, and use an ESD mat, if you can.

  • FireWire (Score:4, Informative)

    by haunebu ( 16326 ) * on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @09:01AM (#7972217) Homepage
    Wouldn't FireWire be better, considering FireWire-IDE bridge enclosures are readily available [fwdepot.com] and actual throughput is much faster usig the Oxford 911/922 chipsets?
  • You want to hot swap for what purpose?
    • To use hard drives as a sneaker net?
    • For backup?
    • For building an "unlimited" storage array?
    You probably want to look at SATA and hot-swappable drive cages, like this one from 3ware. [3ware.com] It needs a case with 3 free 5 1/2" drive bays to install, but it works like a dream...
    • The problem with the 3ware cages for anything other than RAID, is that you can't just buy the cartridges (the tray the drive sits in) without buying more complete enclosures.

      This is a fatal flaw if you want to use it in any capacity other than RAID, considering the enclosures cost so damn much.
    • Yeah, been using two of these 3ware cages (plus their Raid5 IDE controller) to RAID5 8 drives for months, quite a joy. You can pull out one of the drives mid-anything and watch the hot spare kick into gear.

      Their online tech support is quite good too, replies within 1 working day.
    • From reading his post, its most likley that is is loading fresh drives for new pcs.

      Haivng to shutdown, power off, swap drives, power on, boot, etc wastes time that adds up really fast if you are doing more then a couple.

      Plus you have the issue of stress on your cables, machine, etc.

      One solution would be to get a removable IDE bay, and hardwire a switch to the power cable to it so you can safely power off before swapping drives in/out.
      • One solution would be to get a removable IDE bay, and hardwire a switch to the power cable to it so you can safely power off before swapping drives in/out.

        Pretty much all removable drive enclosures have this already. The key lock that keeps the drive from being yanked out is also the power switch.

  • Buffering Bug in Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by Crutcher ( 24607 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @09:14AM (#7972297) Homepage
    Okay, I use a USB drive enclosure on Linux to do my backups, and it works pretty well.

    However, it took me a very long time to learn to set the 'sync' option in the mount options. USB writes much more slowly than a normal harddrive, and if sync isn't set, it is possible for the system to buffer all writes to the drive up to the point where it consumes most system memory, and the machine becomes unresponsive.

    Perhaps this is fixed in 2.6; but it doesn't really matter. You are doing backups, the backup isn't done until it's all on the disk, so setting the sync option just means that your writes "seem" to take longer, and your unmount at the end seems faster. Without sync, you pay for the buffering in the unmount, which will hang while it finishes syncing the disk.
    • I believe this bug is fixed if 2.4 line. I'm using 2.4.24, but I think it's been around since 2.4.21 or earlier.

      You have to select "Code maturity level options" and say "y" to "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers". Then, under "SCSI support", say "y" to "Enable extra checks in new queueing code".

      CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL=y
      CONFIG_SCSI_DEBUG_QUEUES= y
        1. I believe this bug is fixed if 2.4 line. I'm using 2.4.24, but I think it's been around since 2.4.21 or earlier.

          You have to select "Code maturity level options" and say "y" to "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers". Then, under "SCSI support", say "y" to "Enable extra checks in new queueing code".

        Thanks! That's probably it (hope). This had been driving me nuts for 1/2 a year or more (easily before 2.4.21) so I finally gave up a few months back and shelved my second drive case. This

  • Hot swap enclosure (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can't you stop being a cheapskate and just buy a proper hotswap enclosure?

    If you can't afford that then a Firewire enclosure will be good enough for what you're trying to do. Make SURE to stop the device before unplugging it! You can buy Firewire dongle devices like the DriveDock [wiebetech.com] from WiebeTECH as you'll be wanting to unplug and plug lots of drives.
  • I use a IDE => USB drive enclosure for doing backups, transporting data, etc.

    It works flawlessly, using the USB storage module in Linux, with one minor caveat, ie. just be sure to umount the drive before disconnecting it(and wait for the drive to stop crunching - sometimes they crunch for a second or two after a sync, maybe because of the HD's own cache).

    • I've been doing just this for some time now using this [ebuyer.com] kit from EBuyer (USB 2.0 To IDE/ATAPI Cable Complete With Power Supply) using a 60Gb ExcelStore (it was cheap) harddisk with two partitions. The drive shows us as sda1 (partition 1)and sda5 (partition 2) - there is a reson for this, that escapes me at the moment.

      It works well under NT 2000 and Linux Fedora (RH), however, I had problems using it under an older version of Mandrake.
      The big issue is, as mentioned syncing the drives, if you find away rou
      • Drives are supposed to get synced before unmount, so there's possibly a kernel bug in the version of mandrake you're using.

        I could be delerious, but I think I recall there being a kernel bug sometime during the 2.4 series related to syncing before umount.

        You could try running sync before unmounting just to be sure... Or better yet, try upgrading your kernel.

  • External Firewire/USB2".HiSpeed" seems to be the safest bet, since you can swap those between computers and everything. At work we've used hot swappable drive enclosures that mount internally---they were only a couple hundred bucks, and have a key that you use to lock the drive in place, if you want. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name, but they exist and they work.
    • I've got a cheapy IDE enclosure that claims to support hot-swapping in Windows (with some kind of driver). I've yet to use this feature though.

      Can't quite remember how much it cost, but I'm sure it was less than "a couple hundred bucks". Maybe somewhere around $30.

  • Use IDE-Raid: 3Ware will do the job for you! (Score:3, Informative)

    by darkfox ( 25385 ) * <darkfox@TZoNE.ORG> on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @10:03AM (#7972699) Homepage
    Go to 3Ware [3ware.com]

    It is really well supported in Linux (and been since a while) as well as in M$. It supports Hot-Swap and Hot-Spare...
    • Perhaps you have not seen these two:
      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi ? id=109618 [redhat.com] .cgi?id=109618">https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzil la/show_bug [redhat.com]

      But I happen to be an owner of a 3ware card, and I regret that I inherited this piece of shit. I would have preferred something that works.
      • I'd be curious about which card you have that is so bad. I've used 3Ware products for a while now and have had zero problems with the cards themselves. RedHat on a 3Ware card has periodically been problematic (early 7.x releases wouldn't boot because RedHat broke the module mapping in their installer - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi ? id=26954 [redhat.com]) Not the fault of the card, but rather the installer. *shrug* I've since replaced that 6200 card with an 8506 (two-port parallel ATA to a four-
        • I'm actually very interested myself. This one doesn't look like an actual problem with the distribution, in that I tried various vanilla kernels and alway got a kernel panic immediately after trying to remount the partition as read/write.

          I do not know the exact model of the card, because it is a pain to get in there. It is a legacy machine that doesn't get much use these days.

          I eventually got it to work by using a kernel that doesn't have the do_brk and mremap() fixes. Specifically kernel 2.4.21-4.EL, the
          • If you do an 'lspci -v', what does it show for the 3ware card? My card is detected as:

            00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID (rev 01)
            Subsystem: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID
            Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
            I/O ports at dc00 [size=16]
            Memory at ed805000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
            Memory at ed000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
            Expansion ROM at [disabled] [size=64K]
            Capab
            • This is what I get.

              00:09.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware ATA-RAID (rev 12)
              Subsystem: 3ware Inc 3ware ATA-RAID
              Flags: bus master, stepping, medium devsel, latency 74, IRQ 25
              I/O ports at 5440 [size=16]
              Expansion ROM at [disabled] [size=64K]

              Doesn't really say, like I said I inherited this box and hardly ever get scheduled downtime for it.
    • I have quite a few servers running Debian and Gentoo with 3Ware RAID cards, and not only is the throughput staggering, the cards are rock solid. We did notice that even with small arrays (4 drives instead of our usual 8 or 12), putting the cards into a 64 bit/66MHz slot made a huge throughput difference. It's easy for us to sustain 100MB/second even on a small array, for writes and reads. Booting off of them makes the whole system more responsive. I wonder if the issue is specific to Red Hat kernels, as

  • Windows XP has an option for Firewire. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @10:06AM (#7972727) Homepage
    Windows XP has an option for not caching Firewire writes. You can then just remove and reconnect the drive without any other adjustment and without data loss. If you have audio on, there is a tone when the drive is connected or disconnected.
    • Yeah, XP has the _option_ but it doesn't work properly. I've lost data/corrupted files even a few minutes after closing the one app that writes data to the firewire disk.

      You're always supposed to go click the little 'safely remove hardware' thing in the tray, which seems to me to be equivalent to an 'umount' in linux, but I'll be damned if more often than not frelling XP tells me that the hardware can't be removed and that I should try again later. (wtf does that mean? write the cached data and unmount

      • Does this help? Sync [sysinternals.com] is a free program that assures that all information in the cache is written to disk.

        However, the volume must not be mounted when you remove the hardware. Try running CHKDSK against the drive letter you want to remove. If it tells you that something is using the drive, make sure that nothing is: 1) installed from the drive, 2) or thinks it is using something on the drive. That includes open DOS windows. Also, it might help if the Firewire drive is formatted as FAT32. I've seen insta
  • Highpoint internal ide caddies support hot-swapping if you also have one of their cards. http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rm110.htm There are also 3rd party caddies based on their chipset.
  • Just to be on the safe side, I should point out that you really, really, REALLY don't want to make big drive images with USB 1.1 (well, anything less than 2.0). That is, if time matters to you at all.

    USB 1.x maxes out at around 1MB/second (12 megaBIT per second). For a 10GB image, you're looking at around 3 hours.

    If you use Firewire or USB 2, you'll be okay.
  • I seem to remember SATA disks being hotswapable with out much issue. Pick up a few SATA to PATA cconverters and a SATA card. On that same note, there are SCSI to IDE converters that you could put into a hotswapable SCSI cage.

    Just some thoughts

    Seany
  • I have had great success with USB 2.0 / IDE adapters work very well in Linux with both hard disks and cd/dvd recorders. I have used them with both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Hotplug worked better for me with 2.6 (gentoo). This is the particular product I bought: http://hoct.com/hoct12/usb20exenfor.html
  • I must second a previous poster's suggestion to use 3Ware [3ware.com] cards. I admin several servers with 2 8-port cards and hot-swap IDE bays. Using hdparm, you should be able to spin down and power off the drive. Once that's done, you can use the 3ware manager to "remove" the device, then physically swap it out.

    Using a desktop removable IDE drive bay, you should be able to accomplish what you want.

    The only prboblem is the non-plug-n-play nature of these removable drive bays. What I want is a bay that acts alm

  • okay with identical drives (Score:3, Informative)

    by bobv-pillars-net ( 97943 ) <bobvin@pillars.net> on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @12:24PM (#7974130) Homepage Journal
    I've hot-swapped regular parallel-ATA drives in removable drive bay enclosures with no problem.
    1. Unmount the partition
    2. Unlock the drive cartridge (this powers down the drive)
    3. Remove the old cartridge and insert the new one
    4. Lock the drive cartridge
    5. Mount the partition

    But since this method doesn't force a bios scan, it hangs if the drives have different disc/cyl/head geometries, or different partition sizes.

  • Commonly, replacement laptop hard drives come with a PCMCIAIDE adaptor, for that combined data and power connection laptops use. Plug the drive into the adaptor, and the adaptor into a slot, do your work, and stop the adaptor. I don't know if there's an adaptor for the laptop IDE to regular, but if there is, you'll be all set.
  • I use an external firewire chassis [adstech.com] and put an IDE hard drive pullout tray [compgeeks.com] in it. That way, whenever I need to swap in a new drive, I just power down the firewire enclosure, swap drives, and power it back up.
  • The newer IDE RAID PCI cards from 3 ware supposedly do hot swap. I have the card, but since its in a TB array with important data I've never tested it.

    Under linux it would just be a umount and then pull the drive caddy.

    Win2k/XP... Dang good question. Under linux the 3ware card and attached devices is seen as a scsi device. Does Windows support SCSI hot swap?

    • I do hot swap with the 3Ware cards quite often (stupid cheap IDE drives seem to die all the time, about 3 or 4 per month out of 600 drives).

      Under windows you can swap out drives on a 3Ware - we have RAID 0+1 arrays and RAID 5 arrays, and in both cases I can remove drives at will under 2000, 2003, linux (2.6 kernels as well as 2.4).

      Newer versions of windows support hot swapping of nearly any device - I even hot swap IDE drives directly onto the motherboard controller (I had to do that to unlock my XBOX har
  • We use Granite Digital [granitedigital.com] firewire drives here at work for backup purposes. There is no reason why this wouldn't work for your needs, just throw the drive into the caddy, and then slide it into the external bay, then when you are done unmount it and take it out of the caddy. They have external arrays also so you could do more than one drive at a time.

    --g
  • I'm not sure if you've come accros these: Accusys. [accusys.com.tw] I'm thinking this may actually be what you are looking for. External, hotswappable, IDE RAID solutions, with very little hassle, just plug in and go.
  • A friend and I have done a fair bit of research on this. Here are some thoughts rattling around in my head.

    --) It seems like some non-"hotswap aware" IDE controllers REALLY don't like having their drives removed... but some tolerate it.

    --) You can really screw things up (even with a "hotswap" controller) if you remove a drive that hasn't yet committed the cached writes.

    --) Therefore, be aware that you may need to disable write caching on drives you intend to remove

    OR

    --) Use a program that sends (I pre

  • Try a USB2 or SATA case. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Wednesday January 14, 2004 @04:23PM (#7977220) Journal
    Vipower [vipower.com.tw] makes a ton of products that look like they might suit your needs. Keeping the drives in the little "mobile rack" caddies is probably a good idea, since exposed circuit boards left laying around the office are just asking for Ms. Mohair Sweater to come touch them.

    As has been pointed out, it's possible to stop IDE devices and disconnect them with the machine on, but this is like playing Russian Roulette. In a spec designed for hot swap, the ground and power connections mate first and disconnect last, to keep the signal connections from carrying any initial current surges. IDE/ATA has no such provision, and hot matings/removals might damage your drive and/or controller. (The same goes for PS/2 keyboards and mice! Just because it works the first 100 times doesn't mean you won't fry your motherboard the 101st time, when the connector goes in a bit sideways.)

    Serial ATA on the other hand, does allow for hot swapping, and USB is obviously designed for it. If you can get away with using exclusively SATA drives, check out some of the Supermicro [supermicro.com] drive racks. If you're building your own RAID system, these things are the way to go. I got a Supermicro server case second-hand and have been extremely impressed with the thoughtfulness of the design. Well-engineered products are rare and special, especially in this cheaper-sooner-cheaper industry.
  • I personally just added a Firewire drive enclosure for both an IDE HDD drive and a 52x IDE CDROM burner. But work mavelously. As a matter of fact on the machine I am using them with, I went from being able to burn CDs at only 4x to burning at 52x, on the same machine. I suggest that firewire is used on older machines, like Pentium and up, or PowerMac G3's where you need a faster IDE bus then the UDMA 2 or ATA3 that was included in the machines.
  • I've had the "Delay Write" error on WinXP Pro SP1a too - in fact this was a Maxtor 8Mb cache ATA133 80Gb running off an ATA-133 RAID card.

    I was using it to stream MPEG2 from my PVR card.

    The only way to fix it was to plug the drive into the mobo's UDMA-100 slot!
  • I had a 486 with the Win95B OS and Apps on SCSI disks, the IDE bus not being used. I found that in conjuction with the pluggable drive cages, I could hot swap buy following this procedure:

    1. In Device Manager, disable the IDE Controller (single channel machine... yes, it's that old...)
    2. Plug in the drive
    3. In device Manager, enable the IDE controller

    And the plugged disk became available. Note that the disk had to be previously partitioned and formatted for this to work.

    To swap, just follow the proc
  • ....if you set up the mounts correctly. It seems to want to mount the entire volume (/dev/xxxx or whatever it allocates instead of /dev/xxxx0 for the first partition etc) with some devices. I think that mainly happens with the smaller ones, so you might need to only have one partition on the disk.

    Otherwise, SuSE 8.2 or 9.0 works OK with both IDE drives and other things such as CF Cards, which have a FAT filesystem and USB adaptor. You will need all the necessary things either compiled in the kernel or as mo

  • Genica drive bays allow you to hot-swap IDE drives in linux, pretty seamlessly. They are also pretty cheap. Every server in our cluster is outfitted with these drives, so we can swap in spares when the inevitable breakdowns occur. They work by sitting in 5 1/4' (CD) slots, with a turn key that switches between the two positions, on and removable. The only drawbacks i can think of offhand are that you have to open the case to install the bay, the droves sticks out slightly in front, and that they require
  • ...provided that you have two or more identical drives from the same manufacturer. I used a removable drive bay where I alternately swap between two trays containing drives with identical specs.
    Just umount the drive, unlock the bay, swap the drives, lock the bay, mount the drive. Works!
    To my knowledge the drives must be identical because the BIOS only reads the configuration once - at boot time - and after that never again. The trick with identical drives works (I think) because the computer cannot tell whe

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