Anyone ever tried hotplugging SATA drives under Windows XP? Obviously only if it's a secondary drive.

If it matters to you, then I'll try it right now.. gimmeasec to plug a SATA card into that box, and then do the inevitable MS driver hunt - install - reboot - whatever.

..

It seems to work just fine with the specific SATA controller/driver that I have here. I think it does depend very much upon the driver, though. I've seen the source code for this one, and this driver definitely has special handlers and the like for hot insertion/removal of drives.

Cheers

Hey, thank you very much!

You didn't have to go to all that trouble for me. I was just wondering if anyone else had tried it. If no one had, I was going to try it myself.

Anyway, what this does for me (hopefully) is allows me to use an older SATA drive as a ghetto removable backup drive by dangling a SATA cable out of the case.

I've got an enclosure for a firewire removable backup drive, but it's IDE-only, and I happened to have a large SATA drive that I wanted to use for the purpose. Based on what you've told me, it's worth my time to experiment with doing this. THANKS!

I definitely doesn't work with all controllers/drives/drivers. I have an external drive plugged straight into one of my internal SATA sockets and if I try and hot plug under XP then the machine locks solid.

In my asus k8v manual it says the onboard sata is not hotplug-able too.
I think i did get it to work once (unreliable) with a seperate program (or was that ide?), but don't remember really, and don't know the program name anymore either.

Big list here of various controllers and whether they're hotpluggable or not.

My results: Can't hotplug, must be the crappy ASUS driver. Don't mind rebooting when I plug and unplug the drive, but it would have been nice.

You could also get something like this. I have an older type that doesn't have SATA but does have IDE for 3.5" and 2.5" drives. I've found it works as advertised, and I'm currently using it with an older drive I have lying around. The drive was working fine, but was too loud for my tastes, so it makes a very good temporary backup drive. I have a couple other old drives I'm going to use for backing up various different areas of my machine.

Anyway, it's not exactly what you wanted, and I'm sure it won't perform as well, but it performs the same basic function.

Interesting product. Thanks for the heads-up. Probably won't use it, but glad to know such a thing exists.

No problem. For those interested, I have this one. Even cheaper, you can pick up the OEM version for $15.