SATA issue - hot swap question

[Steerpike]

Not really a silent PC question I know, but having bought a bunch of SATA drives for silent purposes, and having mounted them outside the case to reduce the heat sources inside the case, it's only logical that I would get excited about the fact that SATA is also hot swappable.

I'm not running raid and am not interested in it; what I am interested in, is using SATA drives the way I currently use external USB2 drives - but much faster! I want to be able to plug in a SATA drive to my already-running system, use files on it, then unplug it, all without rebooting or shutting down or whatever. I've actually done this, and it works - sort of. I plug in a drive, and a new 'd:' drive shows up. I can read/write to it; I can then unplug it, and the 'd:' drive disappears. But ... one file I'm almost positive I saved to the drive can't be found; this could be user-error, but I'm thinking .. I never 'unmounted' or 'shut down' or 'stopped' the drive the way I do when I use USB2 drives .. so there is a chance that data was cached and not written, perhaps?

So ... anyway ... is there a way to safely use SATA drives as true removable storage in this manner? Perhaps a utility from the SATA interface mfr, or drive mfr? I'm currently using Samsungs, maxtors, and Seagate SATA drives, and I use Adaptec SATA (non-raid) cards.

Any thoughts/pointers on this one, anyone?

Bye the way - the drive I'm using in this manner is mounted in an external enclosure, 'metal gear box', and has a power switch, etc - also has sata, USB2, and Firewire connectors.

Thanks!

[starsky]

Steerspike, I have done a *HEAP* of work with Hot Swappable SATA drives, on both AMD and p4 systems... below is a summary of my findings.

First you should, if possible, use a SATA drive bay that supports hot swap. I bought 3 of these for some testing on different systems.http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/show_prod ... ory_id=245. (Note: I removed the fans from them)

Hot Swap SATA on Silicon Image Si311x chipsets. These are often found onboard on Nvidia Nforce2 boards. (Like DFI Lanparty Nforce 2 and Abit NF7-S v2 and AN7). You can also get cheap $20-$50 PCI cards that have si311x chipsets on them. I got these to hotswap perfectly in Windows XP using the drive bay mentioned above. I just had to install the Siicon Image drivers that came with the motherboard. I then had to update the drivers to get SMART working over the SATA.

Hot Swap for SATA does NOT seem to work properly on Intel ICH5 or ICH5R chipsets, even with all of the correct hardware. I have been unable to find any evidence from anyone on how to get hotswap working off Native Intel ICH5/R SATA ports. Installing the Intell ICH software didn't help at all. (Ralf Hutter was also looking at this at one stage and didn't get it working). You end up getting symptoms like you mentioned with caching. Note you can modify the "Policy" in Device Manager on your hard drive to be optimised for quick removal rather than performance... and this hsould minimise the problems. It will not fix it though...


So, use a hot swap drive bay and if you "desperately" need Hotswap on an Intel System, buy a cheap si311x SATA controller card.


I hope this helps.

[Steerpike]

Starsky - thanks! I'm not the only one!

So can I ask you - is there anything I am supposed to do to safely shut down the sata device, the equivalent of the 'safely remove hardware' applet? Now that I think of it, that 'safely remove hardware' applet is not just for USB; on my laptop, I can 'stop' the CD ROM drive, since it's removable also. So that suggests I should be able to set something, somehwere in windows, to define the device as removable, and after doing that, I should be able to stop it using this applet?

When you say you got this working, what is the definition of 'success' - obviously, a lack of problems, but anything else? Showing up in the 'safely remove...' applet is one thing, of course, but anything else?

You refer to the Si311x chipset; can you tell me what brands of controller cards contain this chipset? A quick google search does not reveal anything. Ohhhh .... wait a minute, I see that my adaptec card shows, on the 'general' tab, a manufacturer of Silicon Image - so maybe I'm in the right ballpark? <update: I found an applet in control panel 'Silicon Image ATA Controller' ... tells me I have a 'Sil 3112 Revision 2' controller - so ... looks like I should be in business?>

My current mobo (an asus p4<something or other>) shipped with a promise SATA chip built into the mobo, but it would not pass SMART data, so I abandoned it and bought the Adaptec card 1205SA. It seems to work well, though I haven't stressed it. I also bought a Maxtor SATA/150 card, but it pissed me off because it also tried to load a 'promise SCSI console' driver or similar, and maxtor just told me to 'ignore it' - so I ignored their card ...

So in summary, what should I 'see' in a perfectly configured SATA system that confirms that I can remove it, and what do I need to do in order to actually remove the drive?

Thanks, and thanks for the link to the external case - looks good!

<update: I took a look at the classic old 'add/remove Hardware Wizard' in control panel. It has an option to 'Uninstall/Unplug a device' - 'Choose this option to uninstall a device or to prepare the computer to unplug a device'. Selecting this option presents two more options, one of which is, 'Unplug/Eject a device - Choose this option to temporarily unplug or ject a device'. - sounds pretty appropriate ... HOWEVER ... it does not present the SATA drive as an option for removal ... oh well ....

Also - just want to confirm to you ... the drive I'm trying to remove is a pure data disk; I'm booting to another device; so I'm not trying to remove a device that was used to boot the system, or that contains any 'system' stuff like swap files, etc.>
>

[starsky]

Steerpike,
With the drive bay, I just turn off the drive bay power, and remove the dirve. When I hit the Drive Bay Power, You here a Plug and Play device removal beep in windows.

I didn't have to do anything to ensure that all data had written. I think that the "Power Button" on the Drive Bay sends all the signals to write cache, and then powers down.

Without a drivebay, you effectively have to "uninstall the device" from control-panel, which is not as easy as just pressing a power button on the drive bay

I have built 3 computers with this (all XP PRO) and all the drives are data only drives, and I have never had a data problem.

1 thing, one of the systems had booting problems if I had the power to the drive bay OFF and the drive IN, even though it was only a secondary drive.

[Steerpike]

Steerpike,
With the drive bay, I just turn off the drive bay power, and remove the dirve. When I hit the Drive Bay Power, You here a Plug and Play device removal beep in windows.

I didn't have to do anything to ensure that all data had written. I think that the "Power Button" on the Drive Bay sends all the signals to write cache, and then powers down.

Without a drivebay, you effectively have to "uninstall the device" from control-panel, which is not as easy as just pressing a power button on the drive bay

Thanks for the info. This tends to suggest magical powers possessed by the drive bay ... unless ... the drive bay itself has 'active electronics' - ahhh - maybe that's it? The drive bay itself could have a small interface circuit that somehow intervenes and helps? I was assuming that the drive bay was nothing but a mechanical device to house the drive, and to provide power to the unit; assumed the data lines would be simply 'pass through' - since the sata spec itself supports 'hot swap' (connectors are designed such that ground wires connect first, then data, etc). For this to be true, the drive bay itself should show up in the system/hardware area ... is that so? Otherwise, what is the drive bay doing that your fingers could not?

[starsky]

The Drive bay certainly has some electronics. They are Simple, but "appear" to be more than just straight power pass through, so I would suggest that the electronics handles the powerdown notification to the O/S prior to dropping thr power.

I could always ask the amnufacturer if you want confirmation. I have emailed them previously and they were quite helpful in confirming that the specific model I bought supported hot swap.

[Steerpike]

Good idea! I just sent an email to the vendor website; if you could ask the mfr, or send me their contact info, that would be great.

On a related subject, I'm looking for long sata cables. I bought some 40" cables already, but they were terrible - I could not get ghost to run. Changing the cables for shorter, higher quality cables solved that problem. So that tells me that you need to ensure high quaility when buying sata cables, esp. long ones! The 40" ones I bought were only $4 each; I just found another source, and these look better (mine were VERY thin indeed!), but they are around $12 each.

[bomba]

I posted on this some time ago here Kinda supports what Starsky is saying. I'd also like to know if these hot-swap bays allow for safe drive removal without disabling in device manager. But, with a desktop shortcut directly to device manager, I find it pretty painless to disable the drive prior to shutting off the power & removing it.

[nap_loaf]

So can I ask you - is there anything I am supposed to do to safely shut down the sata device, the equivalent of the 'safely remove hardware' applet? Now that I think of it, that 'safely remove hardware' applet is not just for USB; on my laptop, I can 'stop' the CD ROM drive, since it's removable also. So that suggests I should be able to set something, somehwere in windows, to define the device as removable, and after doing that, I should be able to stop it using this applet?

One way to do this (without using a drive bay) is to look under the Disk drives section of Device Manager - right click on your sata drive and choose Uninstall. Usually the drive just disappears from the list straight away, but occasionally Windows asks to reboot. I'm not sure what causes that to happen.

Also, make sure you plug the power cable in first when installing the drive, and remove the power cable last when uninstalling it.

[Steerpike]

Thanks for the tips on 'uninstalling' in device manager. I will try that.

I've done lots of research and testing on this. If you have built-in (mobo) sata chipsets, there is a chance your sata drives are showing up as IDE devices, while if you use add-in cards, the drives show up as SCSI. If they show up as SCSI, there seems to be no way to disable write-caching.

I have an add-in SATA card in my work computer. I hooked up my sata drive. If I plug the drive in, it shows up as a new drive, no problem. If I unplug it (whithout any prior action), the drive disappears without any error. BUT - files written to the drive were not found on re-hook up of the disk. I first created a simple 1-line text file on the drive; waited ~5 minutes; powered it down; powered back up (no errors/warnings); file not present. I then copied a folder with 333 files in it; on the target, I used 'properties' to validate the 333 files were there. After about 5 minutes, powered the drive down, then back up. Only about 75 files were in the folder. So relying on a 'few seconds' just doesn't seem to cut it (which is very worrying, for other reasons ...).

So deinstalling in dev mgr sounds like a great idea - I'll try this tomorrow.

[bomba]

Thanks for the tips on 'uninstalling' in device manager. I will try that.

Alternately, you can use device manager to "disable" the drive prior to power down/removal, and "enable" after insertion and power-up. The link in my prior post gives info as to how to create a desktop shortcut directly to Device Manager. This makes disable/enable much more convenient than having to go thru the control panel to launch device manager.

[Steerpike]

I just tried 'disable' in device manager, but I got the 'your hardware settings have changed ... must restart ... want to restart now?' dialog. I don't get this often in Win XP, which suggests it really things it 'should'. Is this an anomaly, or do you just ignore the desire to reboot?

I ignored the prompt (said 'no') and the device remains visible/active in wndows. If I right click on it again in dev mgr, 'enable' is now the option there - so it's disabled according to dev mgr, but fully functional according to explorer. After disabling (and not rebooting), I shut it down, then powered back up. Went into dev mgr again, re-enabled, and drive showed up. BUT - files copied prior to disabling were NOT there.

Will try a reboot and update results here.
<UPDATE>
No luck. Each time I try to 'disable' the device (or uninstall) in device manager, the system wants to reboot. If I don't, and I shut down the drive, files that I copied to the drive are not present on powering it up again. When I finally do a reboot, if I leave the drive on, windows detects that the drive is 'dirty' and cleans up stuff, and I find that I have a 'found' folder, containing lots of files.

So ... in my case, using a SATA card, it simply does not like being turned off!

[nap_loaf]

Don't have any useful advice to add, but I'll mention that I run SATA drives off both an Intel integrated controller (ICH5R) and a Silicon Image controller (built into my motherboard - not a seperate PCI card). The ones on the Intel controller show up as normal IDE drives, while drives on the Silicon Image controller indeed appear as SCSI. All of my hotswapping is done off the Silicon Image one.

Microsoft has a page about SATA but the hotplugging section doesn't say much, other than that Windows has no built-in support for it.

[bomba]

Not sure what kind of SATA controller you're using, but I can tell you for sure that it doesn't work on the ASUS 865PE/ICH5 implementation of my p4p800 dlx motherboard. I had to buy an add-on pci Silicon Image 3112 SATA controller. My understanding is that SATA hot swap is not implemented on ANY ICH5 motherboards, but works fine on all Silicon Image 311x based controllers.

Edit, 9-10-04: Per nap_loaf, I tried "uninstalling" in Device manager last night. Seems to have an edge over using "disable." Difference being when a uninstalled SATA drive is hot-plugged, it is automatically installed by WindowsXP. When a disabled SATA drive is hot-plugged, it must be "enabled" in Device Manager before it can be used.

[Steerpike]

Not sure what kind of SATA controller you're using, but I can tell you for sure that it doesn't work on the ASUS 865PE/ICH5 implementation of my p4p800 dlx motherboard. I had to buy an add-on pci Silicon Image 3112 SATA controller. My understanding is that SATA hot swap is not implemented on ANY ICH5 motherboards, but works fine on all Silicon Image 311x based controllers.

I'm testing two configurations right now; at work I have a Maxtor PCI SATA card (not raid), which uses a promise SATA chipset; and at home, I have an Adaptec PCI SATA card (not raid), which uses a Silicon Image SATA chipset.

My most recent testing (above, related to disabling/uninstalling in dev mgr) has been with the maxtor card at work, and this has failed miserably. I will test at home on my silicon image card to see if it works better.

I'm coming to the conclusion, though, that SATA is by no means a 'standard' solution to the hot swap issue. At best, you can find a specific motherboard and/or specific SATA card that will let you successfully hot-swap, but it's not going to be a generalised solution.

[Steerpike]

Finally, some good news ... I tested at home, where I have an adaptec SATA card using a Silicon Image chipset.

Going to Device Manager and 'disabling' the drive did NOT require me to reboot, and, testing with numerous files/directories, all indications are that data is fully written - so this is workable for me.

Now, my home systems are Windows 2000 Pro, while my office computer is Windows XP Pro. Not sure whether the differences are because of OS, SATA card chipset, or even motherboard. My home motherboards are Asus p4pe and p4b533 (both have the adaptec sata card, both win2k, both work the same). My office motherboard is 'whatever dell dimensions use'

Anyway, will keep testing!

[starsky]

Steerpike.. assuming your SATA Cards have external SATA Data and Power, you could just buy 2 Drive Bays, and use them externally ?

or something like this ?

http://www.provantage.com/buy-22085737- ... opping.htm

[Steerpike]

Steerpike.. assuming your SATA Cards have external SATA Data and Power, you could just buy 2 Drive Bays, and use them externally ?

or something like this ?

http://www.provantage.com/buy-22085737- ... opping.htm

Well, Starsky, I think you finally helped me nail the problem - or at least, confirm my suspicions. By following the link you provided above, then following another link to the addonics site for this product
http://www.addonics.com/products/combo_ ... sa35-r.asp
There is a footnote to the 'hot swap' feature, and it reads as follows:

"...
Hot swappable (1), hard drive can be removed or add to the system without restarting*

(1) Serial ATA hot swap feature works only with controllers basing on Silicon Image chip set from our inhouse testing. Other controllers that are not Silicon Image based may not support hot swap. ... New controllers from Intel and other suppliers may finally correct the problem. ..."

And that's exactly what I've found ... using my Silicon Image-based Adaptec SATA card, I can hot swap; using my promise-based Maxtor SATA card, I cannot. Many usenet postings also confirm that some intel chipsets support hot swap now too.

So the trick is in the controller card, not in any particular drive or drive bay. Reading more about the product above, they don't provide any electronics of their own; the sata connection is made directly to the drive. This is the 'feature bullet' that gives this away: "Point to point Serial ATA connection (no cable to connect hard drive to enclosure) ".

Note: I'm still testing this whole approach. With my disastrous Maxtor/Promise card, when I powered down the drive, no error messages were given, but data theoretically written to the drive was lost. Attempts to uninstall or disable the drive forced me to reboot, defeating the point. I will try simply powering down a drive connected to the Adaptec card tomorrow, see if data is lost. It's pretty worrying, really, to think that the Maxtor card did not 'flush' data even after several minutes - this does not bode well for power failure situations!

[Gholam]

My 2c - NVidia nForce3 250 series of chipsets do support hot-plug. Intel ICH6 series of south bridges is supposed to support it as well, but I don't have personal experience with them to confirm it.

[Steerpike]

Spent the day testing this in the background (while earning my living!). Infuriatingly inconsistent results!

First off, I uninstalled and removed my Maxtor/Promise sata card, and put in a new Adaptec/Silicon Image card in my 'work' dell dimension (XP pro).

Tested and tested and tested ...

First of all, if I just 'power down' the sata drive (after copying a bunch of files to it), data always seems to be retained and no warnings or errors generated (I always wait about 30 seconds). This is very good news, and is quite different from the results I got with my Maxtor card - so to the garbage can with it, for sure!

But ... If I tried to be a 'good boy' and 'disable' the drive first, in dev mgr, then ... 50% of the time it would disable cleanly, 50% it would want to reboot for changes to take effect. I found that, if I ignored it's urging to reboot, and powered it down anyway, no data was lost (in my limited testing!).

I could not determine any 'pattern' to this; I made sure explorer was not 'viewing' the sata drive, and I always waited and watched the drive light. I turned off the recycle bin, etc. But nothing seemed to give this repeatability. But anyway, bottom line seems to be, I can copy data and shut the drive down and rely on the data being there, which is more than I can say for the Maxtor card!

Note: I also had problems with my drive when it was configured as a 'dynamic' disk - this is just one of those options you get when you install a new drive. I naiively chose 'dynamic' as it sounded better, but with a dynamic disk, I always had to 'import' or 'reactivate' it when powered up, AND, I could only shut it down and power it back up once; after which, I had to re-boot. Re-creating the volume as a 'basic disk' cured this. I also set just one partition, and made it a primary partition - for what it's worth.

[starsky]

steerpike... talk about full circle...

going back to my first post......

1 - get drive bays that support hot swap...
2 - use si311x chipsets ...

[starsky]

My 2c - NVidia nForce3 250 series of chipsets do support hot-plug. Intel ICH6 series of south bridges is supposed to support it as well, but I don't have personal experience with them to confirm it.

The ICH5 spec says it is supported... but Intel don't provide drivers that support it. There is no point having a chipset that has hot swap support if xp has no driver. So lame on Intel's part... If they do the same with ICH6 then they are bigger fools than I thought.

HENCE: with the si311x SATA chipsets, you have to install the SATAlink software to get hot swap to work consistently. The software manages the power down notifications to ensure the data writes before the device powers down. (Note: this means you should use a drive bay with a power switch.....)

[jasond]

Greetings. Thought I'd relate my 2 cents.

Over the summer we installed two internal Kingwin KF-81-T-BK SATA racks:
http://kingwin.com/pdut_detail.asp?Line ... =44&ID=164

One went into a server running W2003 Server with an MSI K8N Neo Platinum motherboard. The other into a Dell 4600 running XP Pro SP1.

On 2003, the drive shows up as removeable storage in the system tray. When I'm done using it, I LEFT click on the icon and select to remove the drive. Most of the time it works. Occasionally it says it can't do it because the drive is still being accessed. However I know I'm done with it, so I turn the key on the rack and power it down anyway
The SATA drives always show up as removeable, even if they're not in a rack.

On XP, it did not show up as a removeable drive and I had to reboot it. SP2 might be better at this though. My 2000 computer at home does not show my SATA drive as removeable either.

All drives are 200GB Seagates. It's worked great as a backup solution. I've only had one freeze, and I think that was because I was screwing around with the OS settings. All the SATA connections on the MSI board are nForce's.

[starsky]

jason - Nforce doesn't natively support SATA... most likely it is silicon image.

[Steerpike]

steerpike... talk about full circle...

going back to my first post......

1 - get drive bays that support hot swap...
2 - use si311x chipsets ...

Starsky - I did contact the drive bay vendor, and they said there was no specific circuitry for hot swap - they are just mechanical/electrical devices. I did not contact the drive bay manufacturer, though.

with the si311x SATA chipsets, you have to install the SATAlink software to get hot swap to work consistently.

What does this SATAlink software consist of? Would this be the driver that is automatically installed by installing the card?

I found this link:
(can't direct link to it; go to this page:
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/sii3112.asp
Click on 'product support' at bottom, then search for 'satalink driver'. You will be taken to a results page with just one item "SiI3x12A: Serial ATA (SATA) Windows IDE Driver - Released" - dated 7/27/2004.

I wonder if this will be compatible with my SI powered Adaptec Card ... I'll take a look.

I also found this article on the Silicon Image website: http://12.24.47.40/display/2/kb/article.asp?aid=10744
(extract follows):
======================
SATA: Hot Plugging Drives Under Windows 2000/XP
This feature is not explicitly highlighted in our current drivers, but all SATA controllers from Silicon Image do support hot plug capability. To remove a drive from a powered up system, do the following:

Enter the Windows Device Manager (through Control Panel or right clicking on My Computer and going to Properties)
Go to Disk Drives and find the disk you want to remove
Right click on the desired disk drive and select Remove/Disable
After performing this operation, you can remove the hard drive without risk of losing any data that is currently stored in cache memory.

To plug in a new SATA drive in the array, you just need to plug in the power and serial cables and Windows will automatically detect the new HD. NOTE: If you are re-attaching a drive after a remove operation as explained above, you must make sure that the HD is power cycled (power cable unplugged) before re-attaching the HD serial data cable.
================= (End extract).

So ... even SI themselves say you need to go through the device manager and disable the drive. That's what I was doing today in my tests, but the problem was, 50% of the time the OS wanted me to reboot. Maybe running the latest version of this driver will help.

Thanks again!

[Jan Kivar]

On 2003, the drive shows up as removeable storage in the system tray. When I'm done using it, I LEFT click on the icon and select to remove the drive. Most of the time it works. Occasionally it says it can't do it because the drive is still being accessed. However I know I'm done with it, so I turn the key on the rack and power it down anyway
The SATA drives always show up as removeable, even if they're not in a rack.

I have a Kingwin External USB rack. It has once done the "drive is still accessed" thing, and it didn't allow to eject it after 10 mins of waiting. The trick that helped was to open a Windows Explorer window and click every partition (=drive) on the removable drive (and then close the window). Then it allowed to remove the drive from the "Safely Remove Hardware" app.

Don't pull the drive out unless it has been stopped in Windows! I've seen one corrupted USB mem stick; it had been inserted for half an hour with no access (or so the user said ), and when the user pulled it out and plugged it to another computer, there was nothing on the stick!

jason - Nforce doesn't natively support SATA... most likely it is silicon image.

nForce3 does. I have no SiI controller on my board, and I even have four SATA ports. Unfortunately I have no SATA drives, but I've read claims that some (or even all) SATA ports are hot-swappable on nForce3 boards. Furthermore, I've read that no driver is required for XP install on SATA drives with nForce3 boards - anyone have any first-hand experience?
(utilizing RAID on nForce3 boards requires drivers when installing on the array, obviously.)

Cheers,

Jan

[jasond]

I have a Kingwin External USB rack. It has once done the "drive is still accessed" thing, and it didn't allow to eject it after 10 mins of waiting. The trick that helped was to open a Windows Explorer window and click every partition (=drive) on the removable drive (and then close the window). Then it allowed to remove the drive from the "Safely Remove Hardware" app.

It's funny this should come up today. I just discovered yesterday this problem. It has to do with the way windows keep file and folder locks. Unfortunately now I have to go clean up my code to fix it.

jason - Nforce doesn't natively support SATA... most likely it is silicon image.

nForce3 does.

Correct. When I said nForce, I was simply referring to the nVidia chipset on the motherboard I mentioned. Which, if you look it up, is one of the 250GB boards. All SATA ports on it are nVidia's.

I have no SiI controller on my board, and I even have four SATA ports. Unfortunately I have no SATA drives, but I've read claims that some (or even all) SATA ports are hot-swappable on nForce3 boards. Furthermore, I've read that no driver is required for XP install on SATA drives with nForce3 boards - anyone have any first-hand experience?
(utilizing RAID on nForce3 boards requires drivers when installing on the array, obviously.)

I can definitely confirm they are hot-swappable on MSI's nForce 3 board.
I've not installed to a SATA drive yet. However using SP1 should require a driver (never tried). I read some time ago that this was fixed in SP2, but haven't had the opp. to try it out. I hope to sometime this year.

[Steerpike]

FYI, I installed the latest Silicon Image driver on my system at work, which has the Adaptec SATA Connect card. Install went fine, everything works as before, but ... no improvement in the consistency of the 'disable' action in windows XP. I still find that, 50% of the time, when I 'disable' the drive in device manager, I am asked by Windows to reboot. All indications are, I don't need to - I've powered down at that point several times and found no data loss ... but ... this IS data after all! I've made sure that no windows or applications are accessing the drive when I issue the disable command.

I also applied XP SP2, thinking it may bring something to the table, but no change.

If I just wait 30 seconds (after the last write) and power down, of course, then I get no errors and no apparent loss of data ... so if I'm feeling lucky, I can just proceed in this manner ... !

This does beg the question - for those of you who believe you have hot-swap working, and who have Silicon Image chipsets, do you bother to disable the drive - as documented by Silicon Image themselves - or do you just power down the drive and remove? I know Starsky believes his drive bay has special signalling back to the controller, but I've not been able to confirm that.

For those who have on-board SATA using certain Intel chipsets, I believe you can treat the drives like classic USB2 drives - that is, they shop up in the 'safely remove hardware' gizmo in the tray, so you are fine.

[bomba]

FYI, I installed the latest Silicon Image driver on my system at work, which has the Adaptec SATA Connect card. Install went fine, everything works as before, but ... no improvement in the consistency of the 'disable' action in windows XP. I still find that, 50% of the time, when I 'disable' the drive in device manager, I am asked by Windows to reboot. All indications are, I don't need to - I've powered down at that point several times and found no data loss ... but ... this IS data after all! I've made sure that no windows or applications are accessing the drive when I issue the disable command.

I also applied XP SP2, thinking it may bring something to the table, but no change.

If I just wait 30 seconds (after the last write) and power down, of course, then I get no errors and no apparent loss of data ... so if I'm feeling lucky, I can just proceed in this manner ... !

This does beg the question - for those of you who believe you have hot-swap working, and who have Silicon Image chipsets, do you bother to disable the drive - as documented by Silicon Image themselves - or do you just power down the drive and remove? I know Starsky believes his drive bay has special signalling back to the controller, but I've not been able to confirm that.

For those who have on-board SATA using certain Intel chipsets, I believe you can treat the drives like classic USB2 drives - that is, they shop up in the 'safely remove hardware' gizmo in the tray, so you are fine.

Using a pci (Koutech) Sil 3112A based SATA controller for SATA hot swap. I've switched from device manager disable/enable to device manager uninstall with the advantage being that on hot plug, drive is automatically detected and installed. Haven't had any instances of reboot required message yet. However, when using disable, I did have an occasional reboot required message. No way 50%, probably less than 10% of the time. My experience with ICH5 on Asus P4P800dlx is hot swap is simply not supported. Attempts to uninstall or disable the ICH5 controlled SATA drive brought up the reboot required message every time. And IIRC, simply powering off the (non-system) drive resulted in system lock-up.

BTW, With the sil3112A controller, I used to just power the drive off without disabling. However, on one occasion, I did get a data corruption occurred message after doing so. Currently, I have a desktop shortcut to device manager and I always uninstall before drive power-down & removal.

[starsky]

steerpike. Without the hotswap drivebay... I have similar problems (data cache write failures).

the hotswap bay must be signalling the Si Driver and emptying the cache before power down.