Re: mobile disk racks
Dan Jacobson wrote:
The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage as well.
I'm wondering just when it's OK to pull in and out those mobile disk
racks. (Where you can slide in and out one of your PC's IDE hard disks
with "the ease of a floppy"). It seems one should slide one in only
if one plans to reboot. And slide one out only if it has already been
unmounted. Are there any other concerns here on Debian GNU/Linux?
(Wonder if the fan on the rack will hopefully go off when the disk is
out, as it is 99% of the time.)
IDE is not hot pluggable. Assume it's only safe to replug when the power
is off at the wall.
Some (eg Vipower) are supposedly hot-pluggable. I spent quite some
effort, did lots of trickery involving building special kernels with the
IDE driver(s) as modules, loading one to not recognise the other
interface and then loading/unplugginh the second when I wanted to
replug. I asked questions on lkml.
Nothing worked.
If there is anything left worth trying, it's the 2.6 kernel.
Better, get a USB2 case. They _are_ hot-pluggable, can't conflict with
existing drives etc etc.
If you're going to be plugging/unplugging ATA drives, be sure to use a
dedicated IDE controller for the purpose so you can't have master/slave
conflicts, and if you can't do that,
avoid WD drives. WD drives require different settings depending on
whether they are
master, no slave
master, slave present
slave.
Getting that wrong on some systems (and I have such) causes system
lockups and failure to boot IN THE BIOS.
I've no objection to firewire, I just don't know whether it works as
reliably. I've had 100% success, but the same of one system's a little
small.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
Reply to: