> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:48 AM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote: >> >> indeed, it ships with the 4 drive trays. Note they are not advertised >> as hot swap, I believe this is probably because there is no SES >> (enclosure services) and Windows in particular is not happy about >> hotswapping disks without one. afaik, if you go to the trouble of >> using the mdadm commands on linux to take the drive offline before >> removing it, you should be able to 'warm swap' as there's nothing in the >> hardware preventing it, and the SATA connector is inherently >> electrically safe for hotswap. >> >> -- >> john r pierce N 37, W 122 >> santa cruz ca mid-left coast >> >> _______________________________________________ > > > > I thought this was particularly dependent on the BIOS to support AHCI, > and not necessarily so much on SES alone? > > Many desktop grade motherboard can hot swap a SATA HDD and they don't > have SES, only AHCI in the BIOS. Or is HP just trying to stay on the > safe side with not advertising hot swap, incase someone with Windows > has issues with it? I think that's exactly the case here. SATA is hot-pluggable by design from the physical/electrical point of view. However, the different operating modes (SATA controller) and operating systems, may not play well so vendors are generally careful what they advertise. I'm quite sure running in AHCI mode and with RHEL/CentOS md raid will not show any issues. Simon