sata hot plug enclousures and controller card

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by planki, 14 Oct 2004.

  1. planki

    planki ...

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    as the title says im looking for a good sata removeable hard drive enclousure that supports hot plug and also a good and reliable sata pci controller card that will support two drives.

    i am going to have one hard drive inside the pc all the time as the main data drive then have the other drive in the removeable enclousure to mirror the contents of the internal drive i dont know whether raid would work for this or not as the raid would be on going, if not i was just going to set up a job in the middle of the night to copy the contents of the internal drive to the removeable one.

    ive found a few removeable enclousres that say they support hot plug capability but have yet to find any good cards that do.

    thanks!
     
    planki, 14 Oct 2004
    #1
  2. sinizterguy

    sinizterguy Dark & Sinizter

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    SATA as a format supports Hot Swap does it not ?
     
    sinizterguy, 14 Oct 2004
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  3. friskies

    friskies What's a Dremel?

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    Yes, S-ATA has native support for hot-plugging. ALL cards support this, even if they don`t say so.
     
    friskies, 15 Oct 2004
    #3
  4. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    But on some the alarm will go off :hehe: Hence me not often hot-swapping my drives. Still works fine though.

    I have a couple kingwin aluminum racks. The fans were kinda crappy with them but as they're a pretty good alum design they don't really need them. Only thing I don't like aside from the crappy fans (I'm half considering replacing them with some others intead of just having them unplugged, one kinda half died on me) is they don't have a HDD activity light of any sort. They work great for what they're meant for though.

    I've used a couple of Highpoint raid controllers - a RR1820a (PCI-X based, meant for servers but still works with PCI slots although the bandwidth is crap with it, RAID0 raptors are just as fast sustained as a 80GB 7200RPM) and a 1420 (I think, one meant for two internal and two external). I like the 1820 as it has headers for HDD activity lights but as mentioned the alarm goes off when you hot swap. It does turn off again when you put the new drive back in :thumb: It does also work if the drive fails (hearing a nasty obviously bad spindown at 2am and the alarm 30sec later realizing sometime between your drive just failed is quite unpleasant BTW)

    I think you would want them in RAID1 to best do that, although I dunno if it would automatically rebuild the array if you pop a new drive in. I also tried building a RAID1 array with an empty drive and after nuking the array and trying to boot from the new drive I don't think it copied over the boot files although it was quite a while ago. A nightly backup job should work fine :thumb:
     
    Firehed, 15 Oct 2004
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