Can I hot-plug??

[jbuszkie]

It's been a while since I looked at it..  And I vaguely remember in the past it was a no-no..  But can I live hot plug my sata drives in my Norco 5bay enclosures?  I hate having to power down the server each time I want to swap some drives in a out.  It's not a big deal..  But if I can safely hot swap it would save me a little time...  Also I think I saw someone on  YouTube do it..

 

The searches here all come up with USB hot plug topics...

 

Jim

[civic95man]

I believe SATA allows hot plug.  I do it all the time with my drives - not just with unraid but in other o/s's too.  You just want to make sure the drives aren't mounted or in use with you remove them!

[Squid]

You can hot plug all day long (just make sure the BIOS for the onboard controllers is set to AHCI).  Stop the array before doing it though.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, Squid said:

You can hot plug all day long (just make sure the BIOS for the onboard controllers is set to AHCI).  Stop the array before doing it though.

And no point even trying it with the array started, because you have to stop the array to assign the replacement disk anyway.

 

On the other hand, I sort of "hot swap" Unassigned Devices all the time from a separate eSATA enclosure, but I power it down to do the swap.

[jbuszkie]

Yeah..  This would be more for unassigned devices or the array would already be stopped.  

 

Thanks I'll have to try this out.

[ken-ji]

Hot swapping works, but obviously not with the array drives.

Unassigned Drives work well, but with a little caveat: Unraid doesn't do a scan of the drive ports unless the array is stopped. There's a linux command for forcing the scan to occur, but for most people, its best to do it with the array stopped.

 

The command in question varies depending on your actual hardware but its like:

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

where the 0 must be replaced with correct controller card.

[trurl]

2 hours ago, ken-ji said:

Unraid doesn't do a scan of the drive ports unless the array is stopped.

On 3/6/2020 at 3:12 PM, trurl said:

I sort of "hot swap" Unassigned Devices all the time from a separate eSATA enclosure, but I power it down to do the swap.

I power down the eSATA enclosure, but I don't have to stop the array to get this "hot swap" to work.

 

 

[ken-ji]

8 hours ago, trurl said:

I power down the eSATA enclosure, but I don't have to stop the array to get this "hot swap" to work.

Never had a separate enclosure apart housing unassigned devices... interesting.