Todd and Margo Chester said:
Anna,
It is a SATA hard drive in a removable, hot swappable carrier
and is connected to am Adaptec Serial ATA 1205SA controller
card, which is also hot swappable, but has no bios setting
for removable drives.
I gave you no detail on purpose. I did not want readers to go
off on a tangent, like telling to set it in BIOS. I am looking
for something like, "go into device manager and set it in the properties
tab for your hard drive". (Sadly, that only works in Win98.)
--Todd
Todd (or Tony):
First of all, don't be too concerned about potential responders to your
query (whatever it might be) "go(ing) off on a tangent". It's really best to
provide as much relevant & detailed information as you can re your problem
and objective(s) together with the specifics of the software and/or hardware
involved. Frankly, it's when the poster *doesn't* provide this kind of
information that causes the responders to "go off on a tangent".
Anyway, back to your problem...
If your SATA HD has been designated by its manufacturer that it has
"hot-swappable" (more precisely, "hot-pluggable") capability, *and* its
controller provides similar capability, then the drive is hot-pluggable in
the sense that you can connect or disconnect the drive while the system is
running without data loss or corruption or damage to the drive. While
there's no need to access Device Manager or other internal XP process, the
user should check his/her BIOS to determine if there's any element that
bears on hot-plugging (hot-swapping) and set that element accordingly.
In addition to the preceding, the SATA specifications for "hot-plugging"
call for:
1. Power to the SATA HD be through its 15-pin SATA power connector and *not*
the Molex connector, and,
2. That the power and signal/data cables be *simultaneously*
connected/disconnected.
It would seem that the only practical way this could be achieved is through
the use of mobile racks designed for SATA HDs whereby the removable tray can
simply be inserted or removed in the rack to effect these simultaneous
connects/disconnects.
One other consideration...
SATA native hot plug as defined by the specification requires the use of the
15-pin SATA power connector, *not* the 4-pin Molex power plug commonly used
to connect IDE devices and frequently found on SATA HDs alongside the SATA
power connector. Furthermore, the specification also calls for a requirement
that the power signal cables be connected/disconnected *simultaneously* in
order for native SATA hot plugging to be supported. (In our case, we
accomplish this by mounting the external SATA HDs in the removable
tray/caddy in mobile racks so a simple push or pull on the removable tray's
handle simultaneously connects/disconnects both the power/signal cables.)
I have to admit that every SATA-IO HD (the 3 Gb/s data transfer interface)
that we've worked with for nearly a year now (including WD, Hitachi,
Samsung, and Seagate, all SATA-IO drives) has proven to be hot-pluggable. I
would add that in many instances while experimenting with the hot-plugging
capability of the afore-mentioned SATA drives while they were connected as
external devices, we've connected/disconnected the drives without regard to
any simultaneous connection or disconnection of the data & power connectors
and we suffered no ill effects that we're aware of in terms of data
loss/corruption or damage to the drives. At least none to date. Even in
cases where the SATA HD received its power through the Molex plug we didn't
run into any problems, but we really did not do extensive testing using that
configuration. In nearly every case power was applied to the SATA HD though
its 15-pin power connector.
Anna
