[Techtalk] Hot swap drive?

[Akkana Peck]

Conor Daly writes:
> I'm thinking about a backup solution for my home systems and (given the
> [ ... ]  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=

I tried that a while back.  It sounded like such a great solution.
No, you can't hotplug them (well, maybe some motherboards can handle
it; I'm fairly sure mine can't).  But I didn't expect hotplug; I
just wanted to be able to insert the drive on a day when I intended
to do a backup, then remove it for storage after shutdown.

Even that didn't work.  It turned out that the BIOSes on both of
my desktop machines weren't good at dealing with IDE changes like
disks appearing and disappearing.  I thought that would happen
automatically (if I told the bios to autodetect), but I found that
no autodetection happened, and in fact, sometimes it made detection
of the existing disks flaky.  If I power cycled several times,
jumping into the bios and switching back and forth between "autodetect"
and statically listed drives, I could get the disk recognized
eventually.  But then I had to do the same thing again when I
removed the drive, or the bios got unhappy that a disk it expected
to find wasn't there any more.

(This may have had something to do with having two optical drives,
one on each channel, so either the master on channel 1 was appearing
and disappearing, while there was always a slave present, or else
the CD was master and the disk was slave, neither one being a
recommended setup.)

It was way too much work, so I dropped the idea.  Now I use a
combination of CD, IDE disks in USB enclosures (very slow, but
reliable and easy), and rsync/scp to other machines.  (Tried DVD,
but I've had too much trouble reading DVDs on machines other than
the one that burned them, so I don't trust them for backup.)

These machines are a couple years old.  Perhaps modern BIOSes are
smarter, and "autodetect" really does now.  But don't count on drive
bays until you've established that your machine handles them well.

	...Akkana