[CentOS] Hot swapping sata drives

[Les Mikesell]

Jerry Geis wrote:
> I have a two external USB drives only 1 is connected to centos 5.1 at a 
> time.
> the USB drive is SLOW compared to SATA.
> The external drive suppots both connections USB and SATA.
> 
> I bought  a little $5 external SATA connector that goes into the
> PCI slot area (does not actually take a PCI slot just the backpanel)
> and just plugs back into one of the available SATA
> ports on the motherboard.
> 
> When I turn off the external drive and put the other drive on
> the connection and then power on will SATA handle that automatically?
> Is there a command I need to run to tell it check for new disks?
> 
> Is this possible?
> Will I have to reboot to get the swapped external disk detected.

This depends on the controller - some don't provide hotplug support. 
There is some info here http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com