hot plugging SATA HDD

Question

Hello everyone,   My system is optiplex gx620. I have two internal SATA disks, one external SATA disk. They are all SATA II drives. The bios says, they are connected at 3Gbps. I am running the latest BIOS and Intel chpset drivers.   So far, eveything is OK.   SATA drives, by standard, are hot pluggable and swappable. Thus, not only the external but also the internal disks should be hot pluggable and swappable. But, my disks are not. Does anyone know why?   The chipset on the mainboard is ICH7, which supports hot pluggable SATA disks. Win XP also supports that feature. If the external disk is connected and turned on before the system start, windows sees the drive. But, if you turn the external disk after windows boots, it won't be detected by the windows.   My only explanation after several hours of painful tests, is that the reason is the mainboard used by Dell. Can anybody share his/her experience on this?   thanks, acbegen

speedstep · Answer

NVIDIA NFORCE3 AND NForce4 CHIPSETS seem to suppoort HOT plug SATA.

Just like USB & Firewire, note that you need to say yes when Nvidia drivers are loading to the installation of the SW IDE drivers for the hot plugable to work.

So far I dont believe any intel SATA chipset support hot plugable.

You could make the drives hot pluggable via SATA to USB Bridge.

acbegen · Answer

Intel says their chipsets support hot plug SATA. I mean it is the standard, they should, right?

And, what do you mean when you say I could enable hot plug sata if I used sata-to-usb bridge?

I am using sata data/power cables as I read that conventional power cables don't support hot plug sata.

thanks,

Ali

EMT64 · Answer

The GX620 southbrigde is a ICH7, but in IDE mode = no AHCI (hot plugging), no RAID You cannot change it to RAID mode (also called SATA mode) or AHCI mode

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