Hot Swap HDD / SSD

[GaryPaulWalker]

I'm looking at putting together a system later this year, but as I do lots of film editing (and most of this comes to me on HDD and SSD) I want to have 4 (or more) hotswap drive caddies installed in the desktop.

Does anyone know if this is possible?
(as for internal hard drives I'll only be using a 120gb SSD to run windows and software)

Many thanks for any thoughts

 

[mishra]

From my experience most if not all SATA hard drives are hot-swappable. In server environment you just slot them into special tray and off it works.
However, server motherboards are slightly different to desktop ones. So really the question should be is your motherboard compatible with hot-swap technology?

Some mobos are, and it is a simple matter of switching it ON in BIOS. Some are not, and it will never work. As far as I know, RAID controllers can handle this easily but normal PC... depends on drives being detected in BIOS. So for that reason PC restart will be required to "register" newly inserted drive.

Could you not buy a USB3 SATA dock, and connect drives like that to your PC? Some USB docks are internal ones.. so you will have a device that will allow you to just slot the drives into your PC (almost like hotswappable tray).

 

[GaryPaulWalker]

From my experience most if not all SATA hard drives are hot-swappable. In server environment you just slot them into special tray and off it works.
However, server motherboards are slightly different to desktop ones. So really the question should be is your motherboard compatible with hot-swap technology?

Some mobos are, and it is a simple matter of switching it ON in BIOS. Some are not, and it will never work. As far as I know, RAID controllers can handle this easily but normal PC... depends on drives being detected in BIOS. So for that reason PC restart will be required to "register" newly inserted drive.

Could you not buy a USB3 SATA dock, and connect drives like that to your PC? Some USB docks are internal ones.. so you will have a device that will allow you to just slot the drives into your PC (almost like hotswappable tray).

All good points (and thanks for the reply) - I did think about going with the standalone drive caddy via esata/usb3 - but as I do this on such regular occasions I wanted it to be a more permenant 'fixture' of the desktop with the installation of something like:
http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/1609...ixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar&adtype=pla&crdt=0