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I have just built a sysem with the EP45-UD3P mobo, Q6600, 8G, 2xIDE and 4xsata-III drives and a Sony Optiarc DVD. I managed to get the latest version of the Intel MSM installed on my XP SP2 system [one of my boot disks] that I managed to get running on this new system. I also have 2 mobile hotswap trays that I want to be able to use for hotswapping sata drives that will be used for backups. I do not have any RAID configured and I have enabled AHCI on both sata controllers in the BIOS.
My question is this - "How and when is hotswap SUPPOSED to work"???
I get various stories and results. I fully expected the MSM utility to offer the hotswapping but the only feature I get out of that program is the offer to light up an LED for the drive. Not sure how much more useless it or Intel tech support could actually be. Does not even tell me which drive letters map to which sata ports. None of the drives show in the "Safely Remove Hardware" application which does not even show until I load it with rundll. Device Manager is no help either as there is no remove option.
On an aside, my Vista system w/ an MSI mobo and nVidia chips and no AHCI installed, "Safely Remove Hardware" will show the sata drives, and I can "remove" them, but scanning for new devices will not recognize the new drive that I swap into the tray. Says that it has been removed and I should unplug it even though I have ejected it from the hotswap tray.
After doing lots of Googling, almost ALL hotswap problems are either 1) folks that have sata drives show up as removable in "Safely Remove Hardware" and don't want them to or 2) folks that have sata drives they WANT to remove that don't show up. I'm lucky enough to have both situations...
On both my new Gigabyte XP system and the old MSI Vista system I have had the best luck with a utility called Hotswap! that sometimes works but normally I have to close several handles that a system process, PID 4, has open and only after there are no more handles open on the drive, can I hotswap the drive which makes some sense but seems the system would close the handles if I said I wanted to remove it and am not sure why they are open in the first place since I have turned off indexing, recovery and trash on the drives I want to swap yet several handles are still eventually opened though not right away on Vista. Xp behaves a bit different though have not studied it's behaviour much yet.
Myths? I have been told you cannot use molex conenctors for sata power yet my mobile SATA hotswap trays came with molex-sata power converters and they work fine with Hotswap! when it works. I have been told that only eSATA supports hotswapping yet the eSata cables ultimately plug into the same ports on the mobo and the drive as regular Sata and as far as I can tell are only different in length and shielding. I've not yet tried fooling with the sSata bracket that came with my mobo,
I really, really want to use these mobile trays as they are really handy to do daily/weekly backups onto, then swap and move the drive "off site" so as to not have all my eggs in one basket so to speak. And I have some other uses in mind. But I want to do this in a reliable and predictable and official manner as i'm tired of having to close handles on the drives or on XP sometimes waiting or doing new hardware device scans where all of a sudden I can remove them where a bit before I could not.
So how and when is sata hotswapping supposed to work? I'm thinking about actually uninstalling the Intel MSM as totally useless without any RAID, as well as the fact that now, though I've not tested this yet very well, it seems that sometimes since switching to AHCI mode and installing MSM, I get very long lag times sometimes when opening folders on XP. For instance, I'll see there are maybe 13 "objects" when I open certain folders but it will be several seconds before the "objects" or files actually show in Explorer. Perhaps unrelated but it sure seems this started as soon as I switched to AHCI and installed the Intel drivers.
With all the hype from Intel on how the ICH10R chipset supports AHCI which should be faster and support what they call "hot plug" there sure is a lot of confusion, at least to me, on this whole technology in terms of reliability and performance. And they certainly could have made it a lot easier to switch to AHCI on an existing system which was almost as painful as getting XP to run on a new mobo. And as far as hotswap, after opening a support incident using their website, they just told me to go see my system provider or mobo manufacturer.
So am hoping someone that understands the ins and outs of hotswapping sata drives, without using RAID, can enlighten me
Thanks! Dave
My question is this - "How and when is hotswap SUPPOSED to work"???
I get various stories and results. I fully expected the MSM utility to offer the hotswapping but the only feature I get out of that program is the offer to light up an LED for the drive. Not sure how much more useless it or Intel tech support could actually be. Does not even tell me which drive letters map to which sata ports. None of the drives show in the "Safely Remove Hardware" application which does not even show until I load it with rundll. Device Manager is no help either as there is no remove option.
On an aside, my Vista system w/ an MSI mobo and nVidia chips and no AHCI installed, "Safely Remove Hardware" will show the sata drives, and I can "remove" them, but scanning for new devices will not recognize the new drive that I swap into the tray. Says that it has been removed and I should unplug it even though I have ejected it from the hotswap tray.
After doing lots of Googling, almost ALL hotswap problems are either 1) folks that have sata drives show up as removable in "Safely Remove Hardware" and don't want them to or 2) folks that have sata drives they WANT to remove that don't show up. I'm lucky enough to have both situations...
On both my new Gigabyte XP system and the old MSI Vista system I have had the best luck with a utility called Hotswap! that sometimes works but normally I have to close several handles that a system process, PID 4, has open and only after there are no more handles open on the drive, can I hotswap the drive which makes some sense but seems the system would close the handles if I said I wanted to remove it and am not sure why they are open in the first place since I have turned off indexing, recovery and trash on the drives I want to swap yet several handles are still eventually opened though not right away on Vista. Xp behaves a bit different though have not studied it's behaviour much yet.
Myths? I have been told you cannot use molex conenctors for sata power yet my mobile SATA hotswap trays came with molex-sata power converters and they work fine with Hotswap! when it works. I have been told that only eSATA supports hotswapping yet the eSata cables ultimately plug into the same ports on the mobo and the drive as regular Sata and as far as I can tell are only different in length and shielding. I've not yet tried fooling with the sSata bracket that came with my mobo,
I really, really want to use these mobile trays as they are really handy to do daily/weekly backups onto, then swap and move the drive "off site" so as to not have all my eggs in one basket so to speak. And I have some other uses in mind. But I want to do this in a reliable and predictable and official manner as i'm tired of having to close handles on the drives or on XP sometimes waiting or doing new hardware device scans where all of a sudden I can remove them where a bit before I could not.
So how and when is sata hotswapping supposed to work? I'm thinking about actually uninstalling the Intel MSM as totally useless without any RAID, as well as the fact that now, though I've not tested this yet very well, it seems that sometimes since switching to AHCI mode and installing MSM, I get very long lag times sometimes when opening folders on XP. For instance, I'll see there are maybe 13 "objects" when I open certain folders but it will be several seconds before the "objects" or files actually show in Explorer. Perhaps unrelated but it sure seems this started as soon as I switched to AHCI and installed the Intel drivers.
With all the hype from Intel on how the ICH10R chipset supports AHCI which should be faster and support what they call "hot plug" there sure is a lot of confusion, at least to me, on this whole technology in terms of reliability and performance. And they certainly could have made it a lot easier to switch to AHCI on an existing system which was almost as painful as getting XP to run on a new mobo. And as far as hotswap, after opening a support incident using their website, they just told me to go see my system provider or mobo manufacturer.
So am hoping someone that understands the ins and outs of hotswapping sata drives, without using RAID, can enlighten me
Thanks! Dave
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