XP not seeing drives as removable

[Roger Blake]

I'm working with an XP system that has a SATA hard drive in a removable
bay, as well as an ESATA external drive. These are listed as SCSI drives,
however neither is seen as removable by the operating system. The system
tray icon for removable hardware does not appear for them, and it is not
possible set the drive caching policies for quick removal. (Options on
the "Policies" tab of the drive's hardware settings are greyed out.)

Is there any way to manually designate these drives as removable and/or
to at least disable write caching? The ideal would be for the end user
to be able to click on the removable device icon to "unmount" the drives
before physically removing them.

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I'm working with an XP system that has a SATA hard drive in a removable
bay, as well as an ESATA external drive. These are listed as SCSI drives,
however neither is seen as removable by the operating system. The system
tray icon for removable hardware does not appear for them, and it is not
possible set the drive caching policies for quick removal. (Options on
the "Policies" tab of the drive's hardware settings are greyed out.)

Is there any way to manually designate these drives as removable and/or
to at least disable write caching? The ideal would be for the end user
to be able to click on the removable device icon to "unmount" the drives
before physically removing them.

The decision of beeing removable is made by the SATA driver.
Its data is written to the registry and read by the hplug.dll
to decide which drives are shown.

It's possible to remove drives from the list, so I think
it should be possible to add drives too. I've shown how
to remove drives here:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...p.hardware/browse_frm/thread/88af269e39119f5b



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



Uwe

 

[Anna]

The decision of beeing removable is made by the SATA driver.
Its data is written to the registry and read by the hplug.dll
to decide which drives are shown.

It's possible to remove drives from the list, so I think
it should be possible to add drives too. I've shown how
to remove drives here:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...p.hardware/browse_frm/thread/88af269e39119f5b

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

Roger:
The system will treat a SATA HDD as an internal HDD, regardless of whether
the drive is a removable HDD in a mobile rack. For all practical purposes
the SATA HDD (I'm assuming you're working with SATA-II HDDs) is considered a
"hot- swappable" or "hot-pluggable" device (similar to a USB device), and as
such can safely be inserted/removed from the system through the removable
tray housing the drive - either using the power on/power off switch of your
mobile rack device or physically inserting/removing the tray/caddy
containing the HDD from the mobile rack. Under normal circumstances, there
is no data corruption/loss or any physical problems affecting the SATA
removable HDD through these means. At least based on our experience over the
past few years with scores of different makes/models of these drives in a
variety of systems. There is really no need to ""unmount" the drives before
physically removing them" in these circumstances.

There are some motherboards (relatively few in number) whose chipsets treat
a SATA HDD (even if mounted as a "normal" internal HDD) as a removable
device in the sense that the Safely Remove Hardware icon will appear in the
Notification Area (a/k/a the Systray) in the Taskbar area similar to the way
the SRH icon would appear, for example, if a USB external HDD or flash drive
was connected. It's of no consequence in this situation since the user can
safely ignore the icon; there's no need to access it for any reason since it
has no effect on the performance of the SATA-II HDD in terms of its
"hot-swappable" "hot-pluggable" capabilities.

The situation as I have described above equally applies to eSATA devices,
i.e., SATA HDDs encased in a SATA external enclosure that is connected to
the motherboard's eSATA port (should it have one) or connected to one of the
motherboard's SATA connectors - so that in either case there is direct
SATA-to-SATA capability.

It's a most desirable hardware configuration and we encourage users to go
that route whenever they can rather than using a USB external HDD for their
backup/storage needs. There are significant performance advantages to using
a SATA (or eSATA) external device as opposed to using a USB external HDD in
terms of data transfer rates and the fact that the external SATA is a
*bootable* device in an XP environment (unlike a USB external HDD for
example) when employed in a SATA-to-SATA configuration.
Anna

 

[Roger Blake]

The system will treat a SATA HDD as an internal HDD, regardless of whether
the drive is a removable HDD in a mobile rack. For all practical purposes
the SATA HDD (I'm assuming you're working with SATA-II HDDs) is considered a
"hot- swappable" or "hot-pluggable" device (similar to a USB device), and as
such can safely be inserted/removed from the system through the removable
tray housing the drive - either using the power on/power off switch of your
...

Thanks for the detailed information! My concern was that it appeared
from the device properties/polices that write caching was enabled, and
you wouldn't want to yank out a drive if the system buffers have not been
flushed out to it. (I'm more accustomed do working with Unix-type
systems than Windows, where you just unmount the drive from the
command line.)

Another question -- if one attaches multiple ESATA drives to
a Windows server for backup, configured as a software RAID array,
can these still be hot-plugged, or would it be best (or necessary)
to shut down before removal?

 

[Roger Blake]

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

Thanks for the info and the utility, I'll check it out!

 

[Anna]

Thanks for the detailed information! My concern was that it appeared
from the device properties/polices that write caching was enabled, and
you wouldn't want to yank out a drive if the system buffers have not been
flushed out to it. (I'm more accustomed do working with Unix-type
systems than Windows, where you just unmount the drive from the
command line.)

Another question -- if one attaches multiple ESATA drives to
a Windows server for backup, configured as a software RAID array,
can these still be hot-plugged, or would it be best (or necessary)
to shut down before removal?

Roger:
I honestly do not know the answer to your last question never having worked
with such a configuration. While I cannot conceive that physical damage to
the drives might occur, from a "data-protection" point of view my gut
reaction would be that it would be decidedly best to shut down the system
under *those* circumstances. At least until you definitively determine that
no problems of any kind would surface. Perhaps you could run some tests on
some inconsequential data should that be practical and gain some insight
that way.
Anna