I'm going to build a low power home server and I've been thinking about using some external eSATA enclosures so I can have external drives that I can add and remove from the server every now and then for backup purposes.
But I've never dealt with a eSATA drive before and I'm wondering how it works as far as plugging/unplugging goes... I've seen that eSATA drives are typically just plugged into a eSATA card that basically serves as a pass-thru to the SATA drives on your MB. So can one simply unplug and plugin a eSATA drive like they could a USB or Firewire drive? Or does the PC need to be shutdown first, just as if you were plugging/unplugging an internal SATA drive?
Answer
Your SATA controller (probably integrated in the motherboard) may or may not support this feature. It's likely if you're dealing with a new motherboard that it does. Basically, older motherboards supported something call IDE emulation rather than using native SATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (which does support hot-swapping).
From the Wikipedia article on SATA:
All SATA devices support hotplugging. However, proper hotplug support requires the device be running in its native command mode not via IDE emulation, which requires AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). Some of the earliest SATA host adapters were not capable of this and furthermore some older operating systems, such as Windows XP, do not directly support AHCI.
...
While the drivers included with Windows XP do not support AHCI, AHCI has been implemented by proprietary device drivers.
No comments:
Post a Comment