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Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?
Patman asks: "I've recently taken a new job where I'll need to be making drive images and such for quite a few IDE drives - say a few a day. I need the ability to 'hot-swap' IDE drives into a running Linux or Windows system. The systems that I'm using are fairly standard IBM desktop PCs, I've found references on Google to IDE->USB converter cables and IDE->USB converter boxes.
Does anyone have experience with those? Some come with drivers for Windows - has anyone used them under Linux? Does the mass storage USB code deal with them accurately? Barring that, does anyone have any other ideas? External hot-swapping would be ideal, although an internal solution would be doable, too."
I can't seem to find any fix, the driver software doesn't permit caching to be disabled in the advanced properties box, so it's rendered an otherwise fine 120 GB Western Digital drive as an expensive paper weight, at least as far as Windows is concerned.
From what I've been able to read, it appears that Linux knows better, and respects the 128k per packet limit, and doesn't have this issue, but I've not confirmed that yet.
It's a bitch to be doing a backup (using copy) of 45 Gb of photos, and lose a few along the way.
--Mike--
Grab a IEEE1394 IDE bridge, preferably bus powered. Linux should support these devices and they are easily, externally hot-swappable. I've had success with the SuperDriveDock from Wiebetech, although there are certainly cheaper models out there.
Hot-swapping an IDE HDD on my winXP box. Not sure what I was thinking, but I burned two HDDs and a motherboard doing it...
Oh, you mean WITHOUT destroying your system? Sorry, can't help you...
L
Wouldn't FireWire be better, considering FireWire-IDE bridge enclosures are readily available and actual throughput is much faster usig the Oxford 911/922 chipsets?
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
- To use hard drives as a sneaker net?
- For backup?
- For building an "unlimited" storage array?
You probably want to look at SATA and hot-swappable drive cages, like this one from 3ware. It needs a case with 3 free 5 1/2" drive bays to install, but it works like a dream...Okay, I use a USB drive enclosure on Linux to do my backups, and it works pretty well.
However, it took me a very long time to learn to set the 'sync' option in the mount options. USB writes much more slowly than a normal harddrive, and if sync isn't set, it is possible for the system to buffer all writes to the drive up to the point where it consumes most system memory, and the machine becomes unresponsive.
Perhaps this is fixed in 2.6; but it doesn't really matter. You are doing backups, the backup isn't done until it's all on the disk, so setting the sync option just means that your writes "seem" to take longer, and your unmount at the end seems faster. Without sync, you pay for the buffering in the unmount, which will hang while it finishes syncing the disk.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Can't you stop being a cheapskate and just buy a proper hotswap enclosure?
If you can't afford that then a Firewire enclosure will be good enough for what you're trying to do. Make SURE to stop the device before unplugging it! You can buy Firewire dongle devices like the DriveDock from WiebeTECH as you'll be wanting to unplug and plug lots of drives.
It works flawlessly, using the USB storage module in Linux, with one minor caveat, ie. just be sure to umount the drive before disconnecting it(and wait for the drive to stop crunching - sometimes they crunch for a second or two after a sync, maybe because of the HD's own cache).
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
External Firewire/USB2".HiSpeed" seems to be the safest bet, since you can swap those between computers and everything. At work we've used hot swappable drive enclosures that mount internally---they were only a couple hundred bucks, and have a key that you use to lock the drive in place, if you want. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name, but they exist and they work.
Go to 3Ware
It is really well supported in Linux (and been since a while) as well as in M$. It supports Hot-Swap and Hot-Spare...
Francis Provencher
"What if the bird will
Windows XP has an option for not caching Firewire writes. You can then just remove and reconnect the drive without any other adjustment and without data loss. If you have audio on, there is a tone when the drive is connected or disconnected.
Highpoint internal ide caddies support hot-swapping if you also have one of their cards. http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rm110.htm There are also 3rd party caddies based on their chipset.
Just to be on the safe side, I should point out that you really, really, REALLY don't want to make big drive images with USB 1.1 (well, anything less than 2.0). That is, if time matters to you at all.
USB 1.x maxes out at around 1MB/second (12 megaBIT per second). For a 10GB image, you're looking at around 3 hours.
If you use Firewire or USB 2, you'll be okay.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Firewire...
How do you get hired for an IT job when you aren't aware of basic computer related technologies?
2000 Professional and Server are the exact same thing
Forget drivers... the only difference is the productID when installing. The install CD contains the exact same files, and the service packs are exactly the same. Hell, they even use the same kernel binary.
It just artificially limits the number of CPUs and RAM.
So whatever is true for Professional will automatically be true for Server, and vice versa.
You should really be looking at something centralized like Retrospect (which isn't too expensive, unlimited clients). Or DVD-Rs.
And tapes can work great. You just have to figure out how to justify spending over $6000 to get an AIT-3 drive or something.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I seem to remember SATA disks being hotswapable with out much issue. Pick up a few SATA to PATA cconverters and a SATA card. On that same note, there are SCSI to IDE converters that you could put into a hotswapable SCSI cage.
Just some thoughts
Seany
"Where ever you go, there you are"
I have had great success with USB 2.0 / IDE adapters work very well in Linux with both hard disks and cd/dvd recorders. I have used them with both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Hotplug worked better for me with 2.6 (gentoo). This is the particular product I bought: http://hoct.com/hoct12/usb20exenfor.html
Using a desktop removable IDE drive bay, you should be able to accomplish what you want.
The only prboblem is the non-plug-n-play nature of these removable drive bays. What I want is a bay that acts almost like the an 8-track drive or the cart-style game consoles: pop out a drive, then pop in a new one -- no screws to mess with and no wires to plug in.
Method of processing duck feet
But since this method doesn't force a bios scan, it hangs if the drives have different disc/cyl/head geometries, or different partition sizes.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Does anyone have the same problems? Solutions? Very very curious!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Commonly, replacement laptop hard drives come with a PCMCIAIDE adaptor, for that combined data and power connection laptops use. Plug the drive into the adaptor, and the adaptor into a slot, do your work, and stop the adaptor. I don't know if there's an adaptor for the laptop IDE to regular, but if there is, you'll be all set.
I use an external firewire chassis and put an IDE hard drive pullout tray in it. That way, whenever I need to swap in a new drive, I just power down the firewire enclosure, swap drives, and power it back up.
The newer IDE RAID PCI cards from 3 ware supposedly do hot swap. I have the card, but since its in a TB array with important data I've never tested it.
Under linux it would just be a umount and then pull the drive caddy.
Win2k/XP... Dang good question. Under linux the 3ware card and attached devices is seen as a scsi device. Does Windows support SCSI hot swap?
We use Granite Digital firewire drives here at work for backup purposes. There is no reason why this wouldn't work for your needs, just throw the drive into the caddy, and then slide it into the external bay, then when you are done unmount it and take it out of the caddy. They have external arrays also so you could do more than one drive at a time.
--g
"Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery."
I'm not sure if you've come accros these: Accusys. I'm thinking this may actually be what you are looking for. External, hotswappable, IDE RAID solutions, with very little hassle, just plug in and go.
Does you wife still suck dick as well as she used to?
Yeah, there is the whole "check WindowsVersion" thing, which can be easily circumvented for stuff like Partition magic.
.NET server (no seriously, try it, you can always switch back)
NTSwitch... it can turn Pro into Server without issue.
Also of note, it apparently turns XP into an incomplete beta of
And as for the install CDs, well maybe you're right about the packages' presence on the disk. But it really is the only difference. All you have to do is run the change tool, pop in the 2k server CD, and install Message Queueing, or the full version of IIS, and you're a happy camper.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
With a WD 120 gig drive in an ADSTech external USB2 case (based on the Cypress ISD-300A chipset), connected to 98se, I've experienced the same issues.
Every once in a while, the drive will spin down most of the way then spin back up, down and up, click click, down and up, and the system will complain that I removed the volume while it was in use. This sometimes happens almost continuously, and sometimes it'll behave perfectly for hours without a problem.
Then something even weirder happened: Before formatting my desktop drive, I backed up all my important stuff to the external 120 gig. After reinstalling the OS and drivers from ADStech.com, it wouldn't see the external drive. The device was connected, but it was seen as a 48 gig drive with no partition table. Connected to my dad's desktop, it was 120 gig and all my data was on it. Go figure.
So, I connected the 120 gig drive straight to the controller on a motherboard recent enough to recognize it, and it shows up as having no partition table. But, popping it back into the external case, dad's machine still recognized it perfectly. Wtf?
So far, USB storage has failed to impress me.
A friend and I have done a fair bit of research on this. Here are some thoughts rattling around in my head.
--) It seems like some non-"hotswap aware" IDE controllers REALLY don't like having their drives removed... but some tolerate it.
--) You can really screw things up (even with a "hotswap" controller) if you remove a drive that hasn't yet committed the cached writes.
--) Therefore, be aware that you may need to disable write caching on drives you intend to remove
OR
--) Use a program that sends (I presume) a "flush cache" command... like this one (I presume)...
Swap Manager
--) I stumbled across a nifty-looking 18KB public-domain command-line tool called "mnt" and "unmount". I never tried it, but it looks promising. It seems to have fallen off the net. So here's an edonkey/emule link...
Unmount
Vipower makes a ton of products that look like they might suit your needs. Keeping the drives in the little "mobile rack" caddies is probably a good idea, since exposed circuit boards left laying around the office are just asking for Ms. Mohair Sweater to come touch them.
As has been pointed out, it's possible to stop IDE devices and disconnect them with the machine on, but this is like playing Russian Roulette. In a spec designed for hot swap, the ground and power connections mate first and disconnect last, to keep the signal connections from carrying any initial current surges. IDE/ATA has no such provision, and hot matings/removals might damage your drive and/or controller. (The same goes for PS/2 keyboards and mice! Just because it works the first 100 times doesn't mean you won't fry your motherboard the 101st time, when the connector goes in a bit sideways.)
Serial ATA on the other hand, does allow for hot swapping, and USB is obviously designed for it. If you can get away with using exclusively SATA drives, check out some of the Supermicro drive racks. If you're building your own RAID system, these things are the way to go. I got a Supermicro server case second-hand and have been extremely impressed with the thoughtfulness of the design. Well-engineered products are rare and special, especially in this cheaper-sooner-cheaper industry.
I personally just added a Firewire drive enclosure for both an IDE HDD drive and a 52x IDE CDROM burner. But work mavelously. As a matter of fact on the machine I am using them with, I went from being able to burn CDs at only 4x to burning at 52x, on the same machine. I suggest that firewire is used on older machines, like Pentium and up, or PowerMac G3's where you need a faster IDE bus then the UDMA 2 or ATA3 that was included in the machines.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
I've had the "Delay Write" error on WinXP Pro SP1a too - in fact this was a Maxtor 8Mb cache ATA133 80Gb running off an ATA-133 RAID card.
I was using it to stream MPEG2 from my PVR card.
The only way to fix it was to plug the drive into the mobo's UDMA-100 slot!
#include <sig.h>
Thing about the website... I mostly wrote it in 1995 when a 14.4 was standard. Check WebArchive if you don't believe me. It is mostly for my own personal use as I have written custom web apps to do things like tell me what VHS tape a show matching a regular expression occurs on. And it is actually linked to by an appaling number of sites because it has been around so long. (If I google for my firstname lastname, I get more results that are actually me than anyone I know.)
Obviously if I started it from the ground up, it would look completely different. I'm not even sure where I would start. I don't believe in superficiality much so I don't really have an opinoin on how things look. At least that's what I had to tell myself when I fucked your mom in the ass... (Sorry, had to work it in.) (That's what she said.) (Really, sorry. I just can't control myself tonite.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It improves with age. Like your mother's used tampons.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Liar!
::crying::
::sniff:: anyway. Yeah, I realize the website is old... so is mine (don't look, I'm warning you!!!), I'm just trying to make you feel like a jerk.
And my dad (well sort of), eh, well, I'd rather not talk about it.
(I mean 4hrs to compile nethack? What major were you at tech anyway... god.)
But honestly. Really. That troll appears like 15 times a day in every thread. Don't ever reply to that. Even if you think it's funny, or insightful.
Because really it's not. It's like replying to spam and ridiculing the sender, or whatever. It just encourages them. Validation for the cut and paste morons sitting around, masturbating in their parents' basement. Don't give them the satisfaction.
Immature children, all of them. ALL OF YOU!!!
(you know who you are...)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Just how does a data connection making/breaking contact before a power connection cause a short? It's not like the power gets shunted to a data line or ground in such a scenario.
Actually, what often happens is that if a drive isn't connected to ground, it can transmit signals at unexpected voltage levels onto the bus. Nothing that should fry anything, but it might wedge the bus and you might have to reboot the system.
It's also possible for static electricity to discharge through a data line as you are connecting it, but if your card/board or drive can't handle that, then it deserves to die anyway.
In short, hot-swapping almost anything isn't as dangerous as you would be led to believe, but unless it's designed for it, you do risk crashing the machine. (With that said, I still don't hot-swap PCI cards unless it's specifically supported.)
I have an external 5.25" USB cage sitting here, the only ID for which is a product code and "Made in China". It currently houses a Pioneer DVD burner (+/-RW, which works at full blast) but fitted with a cheapo 5.25" removable tray for 3.5" drives it also works fine with 80 and 120GB 7200 RPM Seagates.
The only odd thing it does it throws an I/O error at the start of a burn (I've only ever used k3b with this drive) but k3b says it's OK and the burn always verifies. I've never burnt a coaster on it.
I normally use it with Mandrake 9.2 on an AOpen OpenBook 1547 laptop (mostly Intel chipset, but if anyone knows how to get a WinBond memory stick reader to play, do tell), but it works just as well on my desktop (Athlon 2400, nForce2 based, Mandrake 9.2 but 2.6 kernel). I;ve also used it with another Linux laptop (specs unknown), a Windows XP laptop, and a Windows 2003 workstation (those last three only as a DVD burner).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I had a 486 with the Win95B OS and Apps on SCSI disks, the IDE bus not being used. I found that in conjuction with the pluggable drive cages, I could hot swap buy following this procedure:
1. In Device Manager, disable the IDE Controller (single channel machine... yes, it's that old...)
2. Plug in the drive
3. In device Manager, enable the IDE controller
And the plugged disk became available. Note that the disk had to be previously partitioned and formatted for this to work.
To swap, just follow the procedure again, but swap the drives at step 2.
Note that this was using the Origianl OEM release of Windows 95B.
You may be able to do this under Win2K so long as the disks to be swapped are on a different controller than the OS disks, and the Controller driver can be stopped and started without rebooting. You may be able to have this happen by changing the startup type of the device driver using a Registry Hack (from "boot" to "automatic" - can' remember the numbers to use...) to have this work.
Otherwise, SuSE 8.2 or 9.0 works OK with both IDE drives and other things such as CF Cards, which have a FAT filesystem and USB adaptor. You will need all the necessary things either compiled in the kernel or as modules, SuSE seems to have all these bits already but I can't comment on other distros. But, if you are experienced in recompiling kernels, or willing to learn, this is no big deal.
I don't have a disk with USB2 hardware attached yet, all my experience is with USB1 but so far, no significant problems.
Just remember to do a umount before pulling the USB plug out, and of course pull the plug out and switch off the power before swapping the IDE drive in the USB box. I assume you will be using some kind of removable drive cradle in conjunction with a USB to IDE converter.
Win 2000 and XP have a few problems, it is sometimes impossible to unmount the thing, except by brute force (pulling the USB plug out) and then you get nagged about unsafe removal. To get the drive to be seen again, it is sometimes, but not always, necessary to remove it in device manager, then get it to add a new device again. Same thing with CF memory card in a PCMCIA adaptor, it is obviously a fundamental M$ error which they can't fix.
There are hot-swappable IDE cradles which can mount into a PC, but there might not be a way of getting the OS to do the necessary. The extra logic in the cradle, and longer power and ground pins, only ensures that the hardware does not suffer a destructive latchup, you would possibly need to make the kernel run some of its initialisation code again every time you plugged the device in. Far easier to use USB, the plug and play code is fairly solid.
There are no filesystem issues if you use FAT or one of its variants (you might need to do a man mount to see if you need options to the mount command, or want to automount) but NTFS will almost certainly not work reliably, so please don't try with valuable data, you will probably trash the lot.
You know, "kernel personality". But they are embedded in the same set of exes, dlls, vxds and sys files. It's like when you enable smp/ioapic and bigmem in linux from grub.
The driver is making an incorrect assumption (probably about per-cpu locks or something). In fact, it might be a good way to weed out bad drivers, switching mode to Advanced Server and seeing what sticks.
I've always had trouble with ATI's drivers, especially video capture stuff on anything but a single-cpu system running 98.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You mean like the big boys in the enterprise market? Like IBM, which sells multimillion-dollar mainframes and charges fees upwards of 100,000 per year to license the operating system?
On one hand, I'm glad that Microsoft hasn't figured this out - I don't feel like paying a yearly fee just to use my own hardware. But let's face it - Microsoft has been literally giving away the company when it comes to enterprise contracts - they sell licenses rather than lease them. Had IBM sold software, I doubt they would be as successful as they are today.
I know a lot of people like to bash Microsoft, but when it comes to exploitation and greed, IBM wins hands down. Mainframe customers routinely pay IBM yearly fees to run hardware they've already bought. IBM software, though, is usually much better than Microsoft's. Perhaps if Microsoft did charge yearly fees, it would be possible to buy a Windows PC that didn't crash.
Regardless, one of the most disheartening aspects of my profession is the amount of sheer greed and legalized fraud that occurs. Some days, I feel as dirty as a lawyer...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Genica drive bays allow you to hot-swap IDE drives in linux, pretty seamlessly. They are also pretty cheap. Every server in our cluster is outfitted with these drives, so we can swap in spares when the inevitable breakdowns occur. They work by sitting in 5 1/4' (CD) slots, with a turn key that switches between the two positions, on and removable. The only drawbacks i can think of offhand are that you have to open the case to install the bay, the droves sticks out slightly in front, and that they require 5 1/4 slots.
I've been using a Fujitsu MHT2040AT 40GB drive in a Hotdrive 2.5 enclosure (supports USB 2.0 and 1394, but I have only used the USB part, because Firewire seems to require an external power supply) and I'm more than happy with it.
:)
I've used it for over a month now, mostly on WinXP, with multi-GB files, and it has worked pretty well so far. Of course, I've been careful with stopping it before unplugging. The only quirk seems to be that sometimes, when plugging it in, Windows Explorer doesn't quite understand what it is. I mean... you can use it without a problem, but sometimes it appears as a blank entry in the Explorer.
But it's nice and small and the carrying folder is a nice touch. Makes it look like a PDA. Now, if only they had included in the folder a compartment for the USB cable...
Salutaciones, JCAB
Since when is there twelve bits in a byte?
4 hours? Maybe you shouldn't have compiled it on your 386.
From reading his post, its most likley that is is loading fresh drives for new pcs.
Haivng to shutdown, power off, swap drives, power on, boot, etc wastes time that adds up really fast if you are doing more then a couple.
Plus you have the issue of stress on your cables, machine, etc.
One solution would be to get a removable IDE bay, and hardwire a switch to the power cable to it so you can safely power off before swapping drives in/out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because it kicks ass compared to 5 years ago, esp. with Mandrake or even RedHat.
I mean, do you need anything more than emulated games?
Anyway. What the _hell_ is SubGenius? It's so fucking, I don't know, lame + inaccessible + clique-y.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Consider purchasing a 2,4,8, or 12 port 3ware controller, depending on your need.
All the ones i have are older, and dont sport power-locks..
I guess times have changed....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Funny thing was, their statements seemed false to me. Every year they pulled the same crap with a different hardware platform (the older students had Amigas). Because of this, most classes had mixed-platform sets of students so most students just wanted ANSI C or similar cross-platform development. So it was total b.s. that you ever needed such a p.o.s. computer. To this day it has served as a useles $3000 box in my father's basement. And that unix sucked even more than linux.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
...provided that you have two or more identical drives from the same manufacturer. I used a removable drive bay where I alternately swap between two trays containing drives with identical specs.
Just umount the drive, unlock the bay, swap the drives, lock the bay, mount the drive. Works!
To my knowledge the drives must be identical because the BIOS only reads the configuration once - at boot time - and after that never again. The trick with identical drives works (I think) because the computer cannot tell whether it is actually the *same* drive that had just been hibernated. The umount/mount works because umount forces all remaining data to be committed to storage and mount re-reads the drive data (like directories and stuff).