Quick question about hot swapping

geuben · 28 May 2009 at 14:30

afternoon all, just a quick question regarding hot swapping drives.

I just got one of these http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-031-BT&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72 and installed it, its working fine but i've just noticed that my hard drives aren't listed in the safely remove hardware thingy, they defiantly used to be there but I can't when they stopped being there as I only just noticed. How do I go about safely hot swapping the drive? I've never done it before and always assumed that you would use the safely remove hardware jobby and then just swap the drive. My motherboard is an Asus A8N-E.

Thanks in advance

Geuben

miniyazz · 28 May 2009 at 14:50

Find the drive in My Computer, go to Properties, and somewhere in there there should be an option to disable write caching. Disable that, then just make sure you don't unplug it while something's copying to disk (as you would normally), and when you want to unplug it, just pull it straight out.

geuben · 28 May 2009 at 15:11

miniyazz said:
Find the drive in My Computer, go to Properties, and somewhere in there there should be an option to disable write caching. Disable that, then just make sure you don't unplug it while something's copying to disk (as you would normally), and when you want to unplug it, just pull it straight out.

I found that option (had seen it before), I can untick "Enable write caching on disk" but the other choices "Optimize for quick removal" and "optimise for performance" are greyed out with the performance option selected. Is this likely to cause any problems?

miniyazz · 28 May 2009 at 15:43

I suspect, but don't know, that those other options are disabled because you have the drive plugged in through eSATA maybe, which is effectively SATA so the OS might not expect it to be unplugged in quite the same way as USB.
I don't think it will be a problem though, even though I'm not entirely sure what those choices do. Basically when write caching is enabled, data isn't writtent directly to the hard drive, but is written to cache while the hard drive decides what the most efficient way of writing the data to the hard drive is. It reports to the OS that the data has been written. If the drive is unplugged then, before the data is written to the hard disk itself, that data will be lost.
That is why it's important write caching is disabled.

Perhaps someone else can help with the quick removal/performance checkboxes? If I had to guess though, I'd imagine quick removal just disables write cache, and performance enables it.