- Joined
- May 7, 2003
- Location
- I had alot of cars...but I RECTUM!!!
It's time for me to get educated. What is a hot-swap bay and what does it do and what is it used for? I figured this is a good place to ask expierienced users.
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Hot-Swap Bay?
- Thread starter PhantomOSX2
- Start date
OP
- Joined
- May 7, 2003
- Location
- I had alot of cars...but I RECTUM!!!
- Thread Starter
- #3
Ah cool. How much do they usually cost and who are they made buy? It's only for IDEs right?
OP
- Joined
- May 7, 2003
- Location
- I had alot of cars...but I RECTUM!!!
- Thread Starter
- #5
Well there's always SATA, ok I'll check it out. Thanks for your help.
IDE drives are not hot-swappable if they are either internal or in a removable bay. If you use a removable hard drive bay you must power down the computer before your insert or remove an IDE drive.
External IDE hard drives connect through a USB interface are a different story. They were meant to be disconnected from the system because USB itself is hot swapable.
SCSI drives are hot-swap if you use them in a hot-swap bay. This is done with servers all the time. It is not uncommon for servers to have hot-swap SCSI hard drives, power supplies, and PCI slots.
Serial ATA hard drives were designed to be hot swapable. Unfortunately many of them are not set up to work that way. To be hot swapable you must use both a Serial ATA data cable and a Serial ATA power cable for this to work. Even then I would not recommend this unless your motherboard specifically supported this.
External IDE hard drives connect through a USB interface are a different story. They were meant to be disconnected from the system because USB itself is hot swapable.
SCSI drives are hot-swap if you use them in a hot-swap bay. This is done with servers all the time. It is not uncommon for servers to have hot-swap SCSI hard drives, power supplies, and PCI slots.
Serial ATA hard drives were designed to be hot swapable. Unfortunately many of them are not set up to work that way. To be hot swapable you must use both a Serial ATA data cable and a Serial ATA power cable for this to work. Even then I would not recommend this unless your motherboard specifically supported this.
- Joined
- May 31, 2004
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- Cincinnati
Most hot-swappable drives are only needed in data redundant modes like raid1 or raid 5. Like for a raid 1 setup where it does disk mirroring, if one of the drives go bad with a hot swappable setup, you can take the dead drive out, and replace it with a new one all while the computer stays on. It then goes about restoring the information from one hardrive to the other, while still operating. The same applies for raid 5 except that raid 5 does data striping and is redundant(more complex than that, but I don't feel like explaining it). Hot swappable drives really wouldn't serve too much purpose for a home desktop machine, but if you are looking for a hardrive that you can plug in and transfer from system to system while the computer is still on just get an external usb or firewire hardrive.
Michael
Michael
