TR Forums

Hi All,

I am planning to buy a SATA Hot swappable drive bay unit. If any one can suggest from any of THESE I will appreciate. Anyway what I actually need help is that I know SATA drives are hot swappable, but i never gave it a though until recently when I thought to buy one of these hot swappable drive bays. A quick Google says that in order to have SATA hot swappable they should show under "safely remove hardware". I have two system and none of them shows my SATAs under "safely remove hardware" Mobos for the two system are ....

1. ASUS p8p67-pro (this is the latest one) with i72600K proc
2. Gigabyte 945GCMX-S2 (this is pretty old mobo) with E2140 Intel Dual Core

Its something to do with sata drivers but I am not getting any concrete explanation/solution as to how I can get my SATA to show as hot swappable. Once this is done, I think only then it makes sense to buy one of those Hot swappable drive bays.....right??? ....

As always I request my TR fellow mates to help me out here ...

Regards
Sammy

IIRC you need to have AHCI drivers installed to hot swap sata drives.

NB Just enabling AHCI in the bios (if it isn't already on and this is being caused by something else) will cause windows to blue screen at startup. There's a registry entry you have to change before you reboot to enable AHCI.

EDIT: of course you don't necessarily have to install the AHCI drivers from Intel/AMD, the standard ones built into windows should do the job. It should just be a case of making that registry edit, rebooting, going into the bios and turning AHCI on and restarting windows.

OK I got it resolved for the new system p8p67, although ACIH was enabled, apparently there is another setting that says hot swap in the BIOS that was disabled, enabling it did the trick ........ I will work on my older system now, which would actually be difficult, I have a feeling. Dont even know if the Board supports ACIH

..... BTW any suggestion on the HOT swappable drive bays I listed, or any other which you can suggest ,,,.......

You got to go the BIOS and set the controller to AHCI mode in order to have hot-swappable enabled as well as loading the correct AHCI controller drivers.

The first point is easy, assuming that you have a second generation SATA controller or newer. You just have to make the switch in the BIOS.

The second part is very tricky, Windows doesn't like to swtich around controller drivers on the fly. You need to carefully uninstall the previous controller drivers and load the correct AHCI drivers for the controller before resetting the system to access the BIOS to make the switch. Otherwise, it will keep BSOD upon boot-up with an "unmountable boot volume" error. In that case, you have to switch back to whatever mode the controller was set to in the BIOS and hope it boots back up again or you will have to completely reinstall the OS.

Any suggestions on which SATA Hot swappable drive bay unit to go for ... ????

Intel chipsets are fully AHCI compliant, meaning they support hot-swap SATA, but their software for desktops lacks the interface to initiate hot-swapping. There is a program called HotSwap! that acts as a hot-swap interface to Intel's chipset software.

The newest version of the istar trayless bays are awesome, I built my new home mini-SAN out of those. Directron has them a lot cheaper than anywhere else. I don't like trays for home systems, they just get in the way.

The outer shell is a single piece of aluminum, the insertion/ejection is a good low-force design that uses the door, the fans are removable and have 2 speed settings, the ports are pass through so no logic to get in the way of 6gbps/3tb/etc and it has dual sata power plugs. (I ****ing hate 4-pin molex, even the fancy kind with the tab assist don't stop the suck)

It helps that they look nice and come in black/silver/red/blue, the pictures barely do them justice.

Bauxite wrote:

...the ports are pass through so no logic to get in the way of 6gbps/3tb/etc...

How did you determine they were pass-through before buying them? That's always a concern of mine but they never state whether there's any extra circuitry on-board.

Bauxite wrote:

(I ****ing hate 4-pin molex, even the fancy kind with the tab assist don't stop the suck)

Completely off-topic, but a while back I discovered (much to my surprise) that the ubiquitous 4-pin Molex was actually designed back in the 1960s!

just brew it! wrote:

Bauxite wrote:

(I ****ing hate 4-pin molex, even the fancy kind with the tab assist don't stop the suck)

Completely off-topic, but a while back I discovered (much to my surprise) that the ubiquitous 4-pin Molex was actually designed back in the 1960s!

Did someone say Molex?

bdwilcox wrote:

Bauxite wrote:

...the ports are pass through so no logic to get in the way of 6gbps/3tb/etc...

How did you determine they were pass-through before buying them? That's always a concern of mine but they never state whether there's any extra circuitry on-board.

SAS capable is usually a good indicator, but thats not foolproof especially if its a standalone enclosure. They are not dual-port, but at the price of "real" SAS drives (not repackaged drives aka nearline) I would skip ahead and use SSDs instead for the IOPS hungry stuff.

In any case I took a look at the PCB (which is removable) and its about as simple as you can get.

I also had some of their older bays with trays.

Completely off-topic, but a while back I discovered (much to my surprise) that the ubiquitous 4-pin Molex was actually designed back in the 1960s!

When men were real men, and slicing up your hand builds character, tetanus or nerve damage be damned!

Bauxite wrote:

The newest version of the istar trayless bays are awesome, I built my new home mini-SAN out of those. Directron has them a lot cheaper than anywhere else. I don't like trays for home systems, they just get in the way.

The outer shell is a single piece of aluminum, the insertion/ejection is a good low-force design that uses the door, the fans are removable and have 2 speed settings, the ports are pass through so no logic to get in the way of 6gbps/3tb/etc and it has dual sata power plugs. (I ****ing hate 4-pin molex, even the fancy kind with the tab assist don't stop the suck)

It helps that they look nice and come in black/silver/red/blue, the pictures barely do them justice.

Thanks for the recommendation Bauxite, pardon me for my less knowledge for this but what exactly is a passthrough, and what could be its advantage ... ???? Also I was looking for a hot swappable bay with an LCD screen to show some information , like temp etc. In that regard how is Vantec Easy Swap 4 ..... it has an LCD and looks good as far as the quality goes. I obviously am not sure if it has that pass through thingi, but a small review of the same can be viewed on youtube HERE The LCD Demo for the same can be viewed here .... http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3012639/v ... oloji_com/

Your inputs .....

bdwilcox wrote:

Intel chipsets are fully AHCI compliant, meaning they support hot-swap SATA, but their software for desktops lacks the interface to initiate hot-swapping. There is a program called HotSwap! that acts as a hot-swap interface to Intel's chipset software.

Been looking for an answer to a similar problem for a while now. Will have to give this a go. Thanks.

sam9s wrote:

Thanks for the recommendation Bauxite, pardon me for my less knowledge for this but what exactly is a passthrough, and what could be its advantage ... ???? Also I was looking for a hot swappable bay with an LCD screen to show some information , like temp etc. In that regard how is Vantec Easy Swap 4 ..... it has an LCD and looks good as far as the quality goes. I obviously am not sure if it has that pass through thingi, but a small review of the same can be viewed on youtube HERE The LCD Demo for the same can be viewed here .... http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3012639/v ... oloji_com/

Your inputs .....

Pass through means it has no active logic to get in the way of the interface, so as long as the overall cable standards for sata remain the same (besides length) then it is pretty much "future proof" for 10gbps or whatever. Passive things like simple LEDs are not a problem.
It also means each drive is directly controlled by the host, some enclosures use a port multiplier or include a primitive controller of their own and these have to specifically support larger drives and rated speeds. Its not a problem you have very often with internal cages.

It looks like you only want a single drive cage, in which case I don't know what to recommend. I tend to avoid singles due to the small fans that are a pain to replace...I also have a lot of drives

I personally don't find a lot of value in a temp sensor or lcd, regular drives don't run very warm. Power and activity indicators with a basic lock to prevent accidental removal are all I need, build quality would be the most important thing.

Bauxite wrote:

Pass through means it has no active logic to get in the way of the interface, so as long as the overall cable standards for sata remain the same (besides length) then it is pretty much "future proof" for 10gbps or whatever. Passive things like simple LEDs are not a problem. It also means each drive is directly controlled by the host, some enclosures use a port multiplier or include a primitive controller of their own and these have to specifically support larger drives and rated speeds. Its not a problem you have very often with internal cages. It looks like you only want a single drive cage, in which case I don't know what to recommend. I tend to avoid singles due to the small fans that are a pain to replace...I also have a lot of drives
I personally don't find a lot of value in a temp sensor or lcd, regular drives don't run very warm. Power and activity indicators with a basic lock to prevent accidental removal are all I need, build quality would be the most important thing.

No I dont need a single drive I will need 4 per my case capability, but at my location these are pretty expensive. SO I was looking to start off with one or two at the max and then add couple later. I do have the HDDs. Two, 1TB and one 2TB drives. Also the reason I am concerned about temp monitoring is that again where I am, temps go pretty high in summers. Ambient can touch 45C easily. For my home system as well, which I have OCed I have dedicated temp monitoring tools, but all those are S/W tools as the system is running windows. The NAS I am looking to built would not run windows. I would go for Unraid or FreeNAS. PLus it would run 24x7 unlike my home system which I only need to monitor when I run it, or play games, so temp is always under observation. With NAS, the only way temp can be always under observation is via external LCD, as I might not always access the online browser tool to check what the temp is ...... hence the need. Lastly I think you would agree the LCD drives would give a bit more attractive look to the NAS ..... , I know this would take a back seat against the Build quality, but it is a point to consider......... What shoudl I go for??? Its the only thing left to complete my configuration, I then will start to built my NAS ......

unfortunately in lieu of not getting any response on this issue I finally decided to go for Vantec Easy SWAP4 . I will add more later if the product is satisfactory ......anyhow my current case does not support more then 4 5" bays. SO I am limited in that sense. But I will probably go for a proper NAS server case later when I decide to expand further, mean time I am gonna experiment on the current config that I have built ....

Regards
Sammy