Hot-Swap Hard Drive Bay

Post by **bicostp** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:56 pm

I've been doing a work-study at a computer repair center, and the manager of the store had a few of these and he gave me one.

I have it installed in this computer. It kind of got flukey on me when I first installed it, but it's working just fine now. *knocks on wood* As of now I have a large HD in it, which is partitioned into several 2 GB FAT16 sections (for my old Windows 3.1 project, since abandoned.)

It was made in 1997, and is basically a pass-through connector for a hard drive. It relies on the HD's jumper settings to determine what its IDE assignment is. IIRC it was made by some company called ViPowER.

However I have a question. Is it OK to hot-swap the drives while the PC is running? I don't have any special drivcer software for it installed, so as far as the PC is concerned I just have a hard drive in there.

I just don't want to eff things up, that's all.

Any ideas?

totokan · Post by **totokan** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:57 pm

It's never ok to touch anything internal if the computer is on.

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:59 pm

Is it this?

I've used one of those. They are pretty good.

I ran Linux on it, but I didn't hot swap it.

loup · Post by **loup** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:02 pm

totokan wrote:It's never ok to touch anything internal if the computer is on.

Not entirely true, if it's a true hot swappable drive it's perfectly okay to pull it while the computer is running, but you might have to unmount the drive and absolutely make sure it's not being read from or written to at the time. If you want to be safe, turn the computer off first.

Post by **bicostp** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:03 pm

That's almost identical to mine!

(But mine's IDE-IDE, and I think mine may be older...)

So I'm thinking it may not be the best idea to swap while the PC is running?

If that's the case, that's OK. I've got a pile of HDs I can switch when the PC is off.

EDIT: Ooh! What about Sleep Mode?

xriverfalconx · Post by **xriverfalconx** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:14 pm

It's never good to hotswap a hard drive period ONLY under one condition. That is if you are troubleshooting your hdd through dos. If you cannot view one hdd in dos, you can load up dos on another hdd, then at a certain point, hot swap it out so you can view it.

Other than that, you run the extremely high risk of corrupting, or even damaging for that matter, your hdd.

Loup is right though about internal devices being hotswapable. You mainly see that in laptops though. Some desktops do have internal devices that can be swapped out, such as extra cd drives, but those are expensive.

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:28 pm

i found that out the hard way........

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:41 pm

I dont think the IDE interface has hot-swap capabilities, like USB or Firewire. I know it looks like you can swap hard drives out, my school uses removable drives like that (so each class' student can avoid destroying other's work). If you want to try go ahead, but I will say it will on be good as there to my knowlege is on way to cut power or tell the hard drive to stop spinning so you risk destroying/damaging it will removing.

Joes2Silly · Post by **Joes2Silly** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:53 pm

I have a hard drive like that in my old comp

xriverfalconx · Post by **xriverfalconx** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 8:43 pm

Sparkfist, you are talking about hdd trays that have a hdd inside it. Those are not hotswap either. If you did that, your machine will crash. I've already seen it happen and it ain't funny especially after you lose all your work and even your windows to the point that recovery won't do jack.

To put it on the simple side, you can only hot swap a hdd if it's connected via usb/firewire (enclosure case or external case).

Post by **gannon** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 9:12 pm

I have a hotswap bay in my pc and swap HDDs fine. I'm running linux though and always unmount the drive before hand.

Post by **bicostp** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 9:22 pm

Yeah I think Windows 2000 is a bit more picky...

But still the least evil of modern Windows, and certainly the least evil version of NT! (Win 2k is NT 5.0. XP is NT 5.1 or 5.2, I forget)

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 10:18 pm

gannon wrote:I have a hotswap bay in my pc and swap HDDs fine. I'm running linux though and always unmount the drive before hand.

Yeah it would be easy to do that with Windows if it gave your that green unmout icon in the lower right corner, for unmouting any file system.

And xriverfalconx, I made the point that IDE (to my knowlege) doesnt support hot-swap, so really the whole thing of an "internal" removeable drive is not possible.... Unless you use *nix.