Hot Swapable mobile rack question

[siratfus]

Just installed a mobile rack into my pc. The drive was formatted to fat32, it was given designated title DRIVE K. When I pull the hard drive out, if you go to MY COMPUTER, you can still see icon for drive K. Which is cool, I found that as long as you can see the icon even though the rack is empty, you're gold. Because when I plug the drive back in, it recognizes it immediately.

Here's my problem, when my drive is out of the rack for "too long,'' pretty soon the icon for drive K vanishes. When I pop the drive back in, it no longer recognizes it and I have to reboot.

Is this the way it is, or am I doing something wrong? Please please help. Thank you!

[guns1inger]

IDE or SATA rack ?
Managed software or simply OS managed ?

Not everything is hot-pluggable.

[siratfus]

Sata.....

I believe just OS. Initial set-up was with the F2 key making sure I turn on the sata ports. Product is Kingwin KF-2000-BK, it does say that it's driver-free and hot swappable.

[guns1inger]

I am not surprised the drive letter drops off. It is the same with any external drive - USB, Firewire etc. If it isn't being used, it gets reclaimed.

However it looks like the OS isn't seeing the drive when it is plugged in while the the PC is running. As you haven't filled in your computer specs it is hard to tell if it is OS related, or something to do with your MB.

[siratfus]

Okay, just filled in my computer specs as best I could. Don't know the motherboard, all I know is that it's xps gen 5 purchased in 2005.

[KBeee]

Have a look at your bios setup, and see if AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) is enabled for the SATA port you're using.
Without AHCI your HDD won't be hot swappable.

[siratfus]

Here's a little more info:

Drive 0 sata-0 on 250 gb wd
Drive 1 sata-1 on 750 gb seagate (the one I'm trying to make hot swappable)
Drive 2 stat-2 on 750 gb seagate
Drive 3 sata-3 off (nothing here)
Drive 4 pata-0 off (nothing here)
Drive 5 pata-5 on (Optirac dvd rw )

I turned two of them off because nothing is occupying them and when the system reboots, it always warn me that no drives can be found for them, so I went ahead and turned those off.

Raid Autodectec / AHCI is what I'm currently set up to.


Any clues?

[siratfus]

All right, i guess it's getting late. Hopefully tomorrow afternoon when I log back in, someone will have a nice solution.

One more thing to remember, it IS sort of working. It's just when there is a looooong period of inactivity, something happens where the hard drive is no longer detected when re-inserted.

Thank you for all your help!

[guns1inger]

The only thing I can think of is that some early boards were a little flakey with SATA, so perhaps you should find out what yours is, and look for a BIOS update at the manufacturers site.

[siratfus]

If it is what it is, then I don't mind. I just want to make sure that It's not a faulty product or something. I'm trying to determine if I should return the hard drive or the mobile rack, and like you said, it could just be the MB.

Don't know if this would matter, but just fyi, when I remove the hard drive, it's to use it as an external to watch movies on my PS3.

Could the PS3 be doing something to the drive? Secondly, what does a normal Hard drive sound like? I don't pay attention to this because usually it's inside a desktop. But now that it's out a lot, and I use it on a docking station, I can hear the Hard drive "talking." It's not a clicking sound, where you know your drive is about to die, but it's sort of like a stomach growling or low grumbling, or grinding. Then there are times when the sound totally diappears. So I'm not sure if that's normal?

[siratfus]

The only thing I can think of is that some early boards were a little flakey with SATA, so perhaps you should find out what yours is, and look for a BIOS update at the manufacturers site.

Man this really sucks. I exchanged the hard drive regardless because it was making too much noise. The new one is quiet.

I also went to dell.com to download and update some firmware for the bios and they even had a sata update. Not sure if these updates apply to me, but I did them anyway, and to no avail. It's still happening... after a period of inactivity when the drive is out of the mobile rack, the icon for the drive disappears. Re-inserting the hard drive goes undetected, must reboot for detection. Not so hot swappable.

[siratfus]

Haha, feel like I'm having a conversation with myself. Well for those who care and for the future folks who might run into this problem and start searching videohelp.com.... I found a workaround in lieu of rebooting. Instead of rebooting, go to Control Panel and double click on ADD HARDWARE, the wizard will list the detected devices and you simply click on it. And now the drive will appear again.

Episode concluded.

[guns1inger]

Not all of us are in the US. I also wouldn't call it concluded. If this is the solution, why doesn't it get added automatically as new hardware ? There is still something fundamentally wrong somewhere.

[siratfus]

Not all of us are in the US. I also wouldn't call it concluded. If this is the solution, why doesn't it get added automatically as new hardware ? There is still something fundamentally wrong somewhere.

Yeah I know, something isn't right. But for now since nobody seems to know, that's "my" conclusion because I give up. I'm simply going to "add hardware" everytime. No big deal, overall, it's still a convenience rather than having to unplug hard drives or external cases all the time.

But yeah, if anybody knows anything, please by all means, keep this thread alive!

[guns1inger]

It is not an uncommon problem, and appears to be related to the Intel chip sets ans associated BIOs e.g. :http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=502463

Plenty of posts like this on google, covering windows and Linux.

More reading :

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/929869.html

[rallynavvie]

I don't trust onboard controllers to anything fancy. Onboard IDE/SATA RAID is almost always just an afterthought to board manufacturers and it's often trash. I've been using workstation-grade boards for years and the only time I've ever had a quality onboard RAID controller was when it was SAS or SCSI, and then only because the chip itself was the same as the one uses on reputable branded cards. This isn't limited to RAID functions, AHCI functions are affected by this as well.

If the workaround continues to bother you then you may want to try an aftermarket controller/HBA with a good reputation. Generally expansion cards are more robust than their onboard counterparts. I use Areca SATA controllers for my storage array (with a 24x SATA backplane) and use hot-swap trays for them all. I have added drives to the array as I retire them and it has never had issues with them showing up. I was running XP on there but a couple years ago I set it up with Server 2k3.