Hot swap sata removes a drive when another is added

Chinsane

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Feb 5, 2011
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Here's the thing...

I have a Bytec SATA drive rack in my pc. I know SATA is hot-swappable, but every single time I plug the drive into the Bytec bay and turn it on, one of my internal 2TB WD Blk Edition drives vanishes. I get the "be boop" like a device disconnection, the drive goes away and the I get the " boo beep" for a connected device and walla...there's my rack drive, but one of my 2TB drives is gone. It shows up in Disk Management, but not in explorer.

I have tried changing drive letters, verifying my AHCI drivers, Google, everything I can think of, to no avail.

My board and stuff for info is as follows:

Motherboard - ASUS M4N98TD-EVO
CPU - AMD 1090T 6 Core Blk Edition
Mem - 8 GB OCZ Obsidian 1600
GPU - 2x EVGA GTX480's SLi
PSU - Thermaltake TR2-1200
Sound Card - Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Platinum Fatality Series
Capture Card - AverMedia HD capture device (don't know model off hand)
CD/DVD - Samsung OEM SATA All-in-One Gig
SATA Rack - Bytec BT-125E with a 200GB Maxtor
HDD - 1 300GB Velociraptor and 2 2TB WD Black Edition (All of these internal)
OS - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64

I am just stumped as to why this is happening. I have the BIOS set to AHCI, the drivers are there in Windows. There are no special requirements as far as I can tell for the motherboard as they are all standard SATA plugs, not like my M4N72-E that has 4 standard and 2 only enabled in AHCI mode (Red standard and the 2 AHCI are Blk). I have not tried hot swapping in that machine yet, but do have a rack in that machine as well, just not in use at the moment.

Anyone on here have any ideas? Keep in mind, even tho I know my way around a puter, I do overlook even the stupidest things, so no suggestion is a dumb suggestion.

Thanks.
 

Chinsane

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Feb 5, 2011
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I think I figured out a solution to this problem in my tinkering. For anyone who has one of these drives, DO NOT turn the bay itself off when swapping the drive out. Just do the "Safe to Remove Hardware" and leave the bay powered up and remove the drive. On a whim, I tried plugging it back in without power cycling the rack itself and it came up with no issues.

There must be something with the rack that is at issue. What it is, who knows. All I know is I solved this problem for myself, and anyone who might have a similar issue will now have a solution as well.