[Techtalk] Hot swap drive?

[Elwing]

Make sure that the mobile rack handles all electrical "shocks" to the 
system.  That's the big issue with hot swappable IDE drives.  They give 
a surge of electricity back to the system (take out) or they take it 
(plug in).  *most* mobile drive bays handle this for you, but double 
check that it says something about "makes a regular IDE drive hot swappable"

As for removing - look into linux hotplug - I believe that it handles 
IDE devices as well.  I believe that you will have to unmount the drive, 
but you can just pop it out.

Laura



Conor Daly wrote:

> I'm thinking about a backup solution for my home systems and (given the
> unreachable price of decent tape drives) am considering a hard disk as the
> store.  One option is a USB based external disk which might be a bit slow at
> the actual data transfer bit.  The other option is a removable hard disk
> (see "Mobile Rack for Hard drive" in:
> http://www.marx-computers.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=Storage&cart_id=
> ).  The question is:
> 
> Can I, while up and running, plug in the disk, do 'mount /dev/hdXX
> /mnt/point', rsync (or whatever), 'umount /mnt/point', unplug the disk?
> 
> Or do I have to power off for the plug / unplug stages?
> 
> In other words, does 'hot swap' mean "you can plug / unplug a mounted drive
> and all will be fine" or does it mean "you can plug / unplug a drive so long
> as it's not mounted at the time"?
> 
> I think I know the answer but I thought I'd ask...
> 
> Conor