SATA hard drive hot-swapping . . .

[Stan Shankman]

Greetings all,

I would like to hear from people that are hot-swapping SATA drives.
And I'm not talking about RAID configurations either.

It seems that the various motherboards (Southbridge drives) and controllers
behave differently insofar as there SATA hot-swap capabilities go.

Some people (including myself) have been able to hot-swap SATA drives
without one iota of input to the operating system.
But others (possibly nForce chipsets) are presented with a "safe removal"
icon in the system tray - much like a USB device.

My SATA setup:
bunch of Samsung SATA 3.0Gb/s drives (Jumpered to appear as 1.5Gb/s)
Asus A7V600 mobo (with two SATA 1.5Gb/s ports)
VIA vt8237 Southbridge
Windows XP Pro

I was able to successfully remove my drives and plug in different ones for
several months. But now, I started getting "Delayed Write Failed" notices
and Check Disk wants to run after a fresh boot. But it was not always that
way. It used to work well - something changed - as if at one time XP Pro
realized the drives were removable and disabled the write-cache but now,
mysteriously, I started getting these errors. Could the write-cache be back
on?

I am just trying to figure out what is going on.

Thanks all,

- Stan Shankman

 

[DL]

Didnt you allready post this, a couple of days ago? and receive responses
which perhaps you didnt like?
The response hasnt changed

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I was able to successfully remove my drives and plug in different ones for
several months. But now, I started getting "Delayed Write Failed" notices

You could try to prepare the drive for save removal
by means of my commandline tool RemoveDrive:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/removedrive.zip

At least flush the file buffers by means of SysInternals
SYNC:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Sync.html


Uwe