Does Serial ATA Support Hot Swaping By Default?

Hey how you going

Hot swappable drives is only available on SCSI servers, i would imagine only scsi drives with power/data cable in one. EG Seagate Cheetah.
So that you dont need to reboot a server.

It would be a easily removable Hard Disk Bay.
Not a Hot Swappable Disk Drive.

Unless your looking at buying a big server, im guessing this is a home workstation.

You will have to :
Shutdown, 15sec
Hit the switch to release hdd bay (3 sec)
Replace drive ( 5sec if its ready to rock n roll)
Cold Boot ( 25sec)
1min max

THat is only in case of a failure anywho.
With serial ATA you should have 2 x sata and 2 x 2 (4) ide.
So there wouldnt be a real need to pull mix n match drives.

Hope this is some help
Sonny

Hot swap has not yet come to SATA raid yet, in fact, many SATA raid BIOSes are net yet stable with various drives, so you are too far ahead of the SATA game yet.  They need to get it stable with fixed drives first, before they even think about hot swappable, and it is nowhere near that stage, as of today.

oups, I mean alternate solution .....

How swappable serial ata is available and possible
http://www.xpcgear.com/pros1100enclbl.html

look there for info and also a hot swapable bay for $76.99

-DEW

>> http://www.xpcgear.com/pros1100enclbl.html

Correct me if I am wrong, but this site makes the "Hot swappable" feature out to be:

"You can pull a dead drive out and replace it with a new one without powering down the system."

Would he be able to swap *working* drives?

-Burbble

That's "working" as in "functioning properly", not "transferring data".

-Burbble

The hot swappability of drives is determined by the nature of the controller, Burbble, and it is usually SCSI that is a hot swap technology.  It is do-able with SATA raid I am sure, just haven't seen it done yet on the motherboard.  

AS DotheDew pointed out, it can be done with an add-on Promise card, but I have to wonder how reliable these removable bays are?  The SATA specs are a lot faster than IDE or SCSCI in the actual data comm. rates, and since these caddies tend to wear and fail with a lot of swapping even on IDE, they might be error prone (with a lot of swapping) on SATA too.

Burbble,
Please read the link better before you ask questions that have the answer in the link.
"Hot swap is supported in the SATA specification, but implementing a hot swap solution requires more than simply using Serial ATA drives--you must use an enclosure like the SuperSwap 1100 that provides hard disk access while the system operates."
Key words: "hard disk access while the system operates"

Theres the 2nd paragraph from the link. If your using RAID thats your answer If not :
The SuperSwap 1100 also works with Promise Technology's SATA150 series non-RAID Serial ATA adapter cards, enabling a high-capacity removable storage solution.

The link I gave was just an example of using hot swappable SATA devices. There are many out there. I just picked out one to show that it exists, and is possible to do.

-DEW

I have a silicon Image 3112 SATA controller, and with the latest drivers it fully supports hot-swapping of standard (non-raid) disks.
I personally do it all the time! :o) (The controller I use is on the motherboard, but you can get PCI SATA cards with Silicon Image controllers on and they support hot-swapping too). I'm not sure about Highpoint and Promise controllers though - although they are high-end vendors so I would expect that they should have the capability to hot-swap standard SATA disks, even if not today but very soon via a driver update.

If you want to do this with a RAID then I'm assuming you're talking about RAID-0. As far as I'm aware, you can't currently get a MOTHERBOARD based SATA controller that supports hot-swapping of array disks, the controllers simply aren't advanced enough yet - Although I think you can get add-in cards that might support it, but they would be expensive, and negate the performance benifits of SATA by going over the PCI bus.

Hope this helps you out.

Sorry for the confusion -- I did read it, but it primarily mentioned "easy removal of failed disks", which led me to believe it was aimed solely towards that. Just wanted to clarify for both my and the questioner's sake ;-)

Looks like that is the solution.

-Burbble

I think Nilknarf's last comment underscores what I and others said above very well --

" As far as I'm aware, you can't currently get a MOTHERBOARD based SATA controller that supports hot-swapping of array disks, the controllers simply aren't advanced enough yet"

Since FASTECHS asked specifically for "built in Serial ATA Raid", I don't think the issue of add-on serial RAID enclosures is releavant to the request, is it???

Ugh, I completely misunderstood the question. Just ignore me :)

>> I am looking to buy a case that has hot swap Serial ATA bays and a motherboard with built
>> in Serial ATA Raid.

-Burbble

Apparently the questioner was not aware points could be split.  

: )