Niall O Broin wrote:
> But the real answer has to be no, I'm afraid. You can't really hot plug IDE
> because the system doesn't know the drive is there. When it boots, it doesn't
> find a drive, and then you add one in - how is it to know it's there? If you
> have two identical drives, and you want to swap them, it MAY work but you may
> still have problems when you plug and unplug the device. Being able to do that
> correctly requires tri state buffers which you probably WON'T get on a cheap
> caddy from Marx.
We bought a few servers with Promise hot swap IDE enclosures. I
succesfully tested IDE hotswap under FreeBSD. Basically set up a
RAID 1, removed one drive, reinserted, rebuilt mirror, everything
ok.
Doing the same under Linux went horribly wrong and resulted in
a kernel panic. Last I heard Alan Cox was supposed to be working
on supporting this.
In other words, with the correct hardware support it's possible,
but Linux certainly didn't support it in December 2003 when I
did this testing.
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