Useful SATA utility for hotswapping

[Stereodude]

I came across this utility today (HotSwap!), and thought some of you might find it useful. It's very handy for hot swapping SATA drives.

The SATA drive I have in my eSATA enclosure shows up under the normal Windows XP eject hardware icon, but a bare SATA drive plugged in to the Intel ICH9R or JMicron SATA-II controller do not. With this utility the HD's can safely shut down and removed. I was able to plug them back in and remove them from either controller with no issues.

 

[ddrueding]

Very interested, thank you. My system has an eSATA plug on the back, and I use it to work on bare drives pulled from other systems (data recovery, cloning, virus removal, etc). Having to reboot my main workstation always annoys me.

 

[MaxBurn]

Think this is what I was looking for? If I have a Supermicro C2SBA+II with just the regular ICH9R built in I can use this utility plus a SATA L to external SATA I pass through cable/plate I can use eSATA in a similar fashion that people use USB HDD? This is my first time trying to use SATA externally in a removable form. Currently I need to reboot the computer to add/remove an external SATA drive, which works fine.

I basically have one of these:

and one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182197

 

[Handruin]

That's similar to what I do with my on-board SATA ports to gain access to my external eSATA drive (basically a pass-thu). I've also found that if your SATA port can support AHCI, you can do the hot plug much easier without having to reboot.

 

[Stereodude]

Should work. You'll need to have the BIOS set to AHCI or AHCI / RAID in order to get hotswapping to work.

You will need the utility mentioned in the OP to stop the drives. In my systems ESATA drives on the ICH9R / ICH10R aren't offered for ejection with the native Windows eject tray icon. However, when they're plugged into the on-board Jmicron / Gigabyte SATA-II chip the are offered up. :scratch:

 

[MaxBurn]

Thanks for mentioning AHCI, I surmise that is exactly why my stuff isn't working at the moment for any sort of hot plug ability as I have intel RAID turned on. Guess that takes over all ports instead of just the ones used for RAID disks.

 

[Stereodude]

I'm not sure if there's any difference between RAID and AHCI in terms of hot swapping capability. However, Hot swapping will never work under IDE mode.

 

[MaxBurn]

Yeah, I think I just need to experiment a bit with the intel storage manager. It has a rescan option to find new devices but I don't see a way to stop and remove a disk.

 

[Stereodude]

Yeah, I think I just need to experiment a bit with the intel storage manager. It has a rescan option to find new devices but I don't see a way to stop and remove a disk.

See the utility in the first post. wneddnce:

 

[MaxBurn]

Hmm, ok I am in win7 now and using AHCI, RAID is off. I have this utility which does seem to stop drives for removal fine. Thing is I can't add new drives without restarting the computer. The scan in this and in device manager doesn't find any new drives. Chipset driver seems to be installed fine and I can see the ICH9R AHCI driver in there.

Ideas?

 

[blakerwry]

what about disk management? Can you use the Intel Matrix Storage manager when not in RAID mode?

 

[P5-133XL]

Have you tried scanning from the disk manager (Computer->manage->storage->disk management). There is an action that specificlly rescans your disk drives and I've found that I can hot-swap without rebooting from there.

 

[MaxBurn]

Hmm, seems my problem is a little more troublesome. The two disks which used to be my RAID1 array are fighting; I had a signature collision that is preventing windows from looking at the drive. After reboot I can see the drive in disk management but it just won't mount. So I figure no problem I will reformat it with another name which I did but it still won't mount, actually it did mount this second time but it kicked out my drive containing data, another signature collision. Going to try wiping the MBR with bootITng. Am I on the right track?

 

[Stereodude]

Hmm, ok I am in win7 now and using AHCI, RAID is off. I have this utility which does seem to stop drives for removal fine. Thing is I can't add new drives without restarting the computer. The scan in this and in device manager doesn't find any new drives. Chipset driver seems to be installed fine and I can see the ICH9R AHCI driver in there.

Ideas?

Did you install the Intel driver, or are you using the one that came with Win7?

I don't have any Win7 machines with eSATA so I haven't tried it yet.

 

[MaxBurn]

I got the drive mounted, had to use bootitng to wipe the MBR signature. It is up and copying now and I will see about the mount/dismount when that is done. Using the regular Intel chipset inf at the moment, don't think the intel storage manager should be needed as that is sort of the whole point of this tray app.