hot swapping

[pheonixchin]

Hi everyone

I have a question about hot swapping. I'm thinking of buying IBM System X server, They have two option, one is the SAS drive and the other is SATA drive. I decide to choose the SATA drive. I have option to choose for a hot swap drive or a simple swap drive. I'm assuming that simple swap is the same as cold swap. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In the quoted price, the hot swap HDD is slightly more expensive than the simple swap HDD. The question are,

What make the hot swap drive more expensive? Is it the drive it self? or its something else.

IBM only offer 300GB max HDD. Is it possible for me to buy a 500GB drive or a WD Raptor and make it hot swap?

Is the hot swap system depends on the HDD or on the controller or something else?

Thank you for any help and explanation

 

[jedimasterben]

SATA drives are hot swappable, so you can just buy another SATA drive and it will be hot swappable, so long as the motherboard has the SATA controller running as AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface, which enables hot swapping, Native Command Queuing, and any other advanced SATA feature).