On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Roger Oberholtzer
On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 15:41 +0200, Neil wrote:
Question: I hear everyone speaking about the hotpugability of (good) hard raid controllers, but is it possible to hot plug a new SATA drive into a soft raid system? Are there motherboards that do not support hot plugging of SATA drives? For IDE it is probably impossible (IDE was not designed for it I belive) unless the hardware RAID controller would have special possibilities for it, I believe. Thanks for taking the time to think about it
Many SuperMicro systems support this. We do this with their systems with 4 SATA drive bays that we swap. Of course, we still need to do a umount/mount. And, this can, if needed, be coordinated with udev so you can specify extra stuff to happen when a disk is inserted.
Hot swap requires support in both the hardware and the driver. More and more hotswap functionality in Linux with every kernel release. (I have yet to get SATA hot swap to work in Windows which really surprises me. I've randomly tried 2K/XP/2003 with our various machines.) Assuming you have hotswap support: I can't say about now, but 6 months ago if you had a SATA drive fail and attempted a hotswap, the new drive would be recognized and assigned a new unique /dev/sdX name. Then you had to reconfigure your raid setup to use the new disk. It was definitely not as clean as a hardware raid controller. I hope the kernel team has been working on that. Who knows maybe 11.0 will have a more automated raid rebuild capability. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org