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Studio XPS 435MT - eSATA hotswap?
Purchased an eSATA drive to replace a FW drive that took a dirt nap. After initializing and formatting the drive I see that I can't hotswap the drive. I cannot remove through the Safely Remove Hardware dialog (drive does not appear) - nor will the drive be recognized if it's connected after booting in to windows (a reboot is required with the drive connected and powered up). I have read in certain forum postings that you sometimes have to enable hotswap in the BIOS settings on certain machine, I cannot find a setting for that in my BIOS. I have read allusions to Dell not supporting hotswap in their BIOS's they release, can anyone confirm? Am I perhaps missing a painfully obvious method for enabling hotswap via eSATA? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
Desktop Machine:
Studio XPS 435MT
Core i7 920
6GB of RAM
Windows Vista 64
Bios ver 1.0.12
External Drive:
Western Digital Caviar Blue
7200 rpm 16MB Cache
Antec MX-1 external enclosure
USB/eSATA
mombodog
12.7K Posts
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June 5th, 2009 16:00
Looks like I am wrong about Dell consumer PC's and hotswap, looks like some do have it, see this
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19276913.aspx
mombodog
12.7K Posts
0
June 5th, 2009 16:00
I have yet to see a consumer Dell PC have the hotswap capability, I had to install a Sata controller PCI card to have this feature on my Vostro 200.
Thinks to understand about "Hot Swap"
1. Hot plug, the ability to plug a Sata drive in while the OS is booted
2. Hot unplug, the ability to unplug a drive while being used while the OS is booted.
3. Hot swap, the ability to do #1 and #2
4. Not all Sata controllers have both, some have none, some have hot plug, while others have both (hot swap)
Dells consumer PC's have neither unfortunately.
The Sata controller card I am using only has hot plug capability, I was using device manager to disable the Sata card, then power down the hard drive, this was a pain, then I found this software to allow hot Unplug. The article is a bit misleading because it suggests having the ability to hot swap drives using this software, but it can only Hot Plug if the chipset has the capability in the first place, but it does add the hot unplug feature to most controllers.
http://mysite.verizon.net/kaakoon/hotswap/index_enu.htm
You really have to do your homework when selecting a Sata controller to be sure it is true hot swap.