Hot swappable drive help?

You can designate the drive as "removeable" in WinXP Home. I'm at work, so I can't give you a step by step. But, you go into Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, Right click on the drive, Properties, and check out the Tabs available. One of them will give you the choices of setting the drive as removeable storage....I'm pretty sure. I'll have to check tonight.

Is this a USB connection? Is it a slide in drive to a hotswap IDE connector? Is it FireWire? I'm not familiar with Vantec.

Pavelow

Dell 8250, i850e 4xAGP 2.4ghzCPU 512mbPC1066RDRAM 120gb & 200gbATA
GeF4MX420 SBL5.1 SamSung48xCDRW LiteOn851SDVDRW
RJ-45 to Compaq 9660, 233mhzCPU 104mbFPRAM 12mbVoodoo2 Win95a<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Pavelow on 12/22/04 04:48 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

You could do it in Windows 98SE by setting the drive as removable.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

I looked in the device manager for the option, but I didn't see one. The Vantec is an internal IDE enclosure hooked up in one of my 5 1/2 bays. I forgot what site I saw them on, but I'm sure it's not hot swappable out of the box. I was lookin around and found a program called SwapManager, anyone ever use this? Thanks for your help!

I told you never trust a monkey!

What I'm telling you is that ANY drive could be set as removable in 98SE. You didn't need any special drive rack, you could do it with a $6 cheapy. You didn't even need a drive rack, you could simply pull the IDE cable, but the likelyhood of causing a spark when removing/installing the power cable made this a bad option.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

I should clearify!

OK, so to make hot swapping work without a hot-swap enclosure under 98SE, you would have to boot with the drive in (so the controller would see it) then you could swap identicle drives so long as 98SE was set to "removable".

If you wanted to boot without the drive, or change drive sizes without rebooting, you would need a hot-swap enclosure. An easy way a manufacturer could allow that would be to add a chip to the carrige that made the rack ATAPI.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

Thanks Crash. There was an option in the disk properties under the policies tab that says write caching and safe removal, but the options are greyed out. One is checked already that says "Optimize for Performance," and then there's a box at the bottom that's checked and says "Enable Write Caching on the disk." Optimize says to safely remove this device, click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the task bar notification area. Any ideas? Anyone? Anyone?

No one?!?

I told you never trust a monkey!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ToE on 01/13/05 00:23 AM.</EM></FONT></P>