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Re: [LUG] Hot swapping hard drives



On Friday 12 March 2004 11:25, James Wonnacott wrote:
I'm considering building a machine with a hot swappable drive bay (IDE)
so I can
use several drives for backup purposes.
I'm told by someone who's tried this that he couldn't get Linux to see
the
changed drives without a reboot. He was using a promise card.
Anyone out there got any experience/advice please before I go spending
money.

best advice possible is don't do it.....

the quickest way to kill IDE drives is to hard switch the power on them, this 
applies also to the non-hot-swap drives when you pull a hot swap one.

I build these sorts of computers all the time, and the ten quid "hot swap" 
caddies are really just removeable caddies, very useful for swapping hard 
drives without having to open a case, they ate NOT hot swap, if you MUST hot 
swap get a separate power rail for the hot swap drive, this basically means a 
separate power supply, doesn't have to be an ATX, and buy a GOOD caddy, eg 70 
quid's worth.

Not this also applies to proper hot swap scsi, you can't mix them with ide on 
the same PSU unless you want the ide to die young.

hth etc


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