question Hot swap basics

[Adcadet]

Hey Guys,
How can I tell if my old Barracuda 7200.10 (500 GB) supports hot swapping? I've enabled hot swapping on all SATA ports in my BIOS, but is there anything else I need to do? I'm a little hesitant to just yank a spinning drive from a running system.
Thanks,
Adcadet

 

[Stereodude]

The drive doesn't need to support it.

However, you shouldn't just yank a drive until you prep it for safe removal. If it doesn't show up in your system tray under the eject hardware icon, use HotSwap!.

 

[Handruin]

If this is something you will be doing frequently, you can also set the drive as 'Quick Removal' in device manager so that you don't have to prep for safe removal. The negative of doing this is a loss of performance due to changes in caching (basically it's disabled).

 

[Adcadet]

I don't see a "quick removal" option listed, although I can disable caching. And HotSwap! reports that it can't stop the disk in question because another program is still accessing it. It does this when I try to ejection other disks as well, as does the default Windows eject option. Anybody know why? I'm not running anything that obviously uses the disk. Could this be a Windows indexing issue?

 

[Adcadet]

Oh, and my disks are set to use AHCI and all disks have hot swap enabled in the BIOS.

 

[Adcadet]

Found the problem - Google Desktop.

This is slick! I have two hot swap bays, and in them I have a 2 TB Hitachi and an old 500 GB 7200.10. I have two drive bay covers for my case (from front panel slots used by an optical drive and a fan controller). So I can run a backup to the drives, take them out, put on the front panel cover to everything looks pretty, and store the drives in my desk drawer until I need them.

Thanks for the tip about HotSwap - nice utility!