[GLLUG] Hot Swap an ATA Hard Drive

[Sean]

Speaking of ide hostswap, does anyone have one of the ata -> scsi 
converters? It allows you to use an ata/ide device on a scsi chain. The 
adapters themselves are ~80 bucks. 

Also, did anyone order one of the Apple IDE raid boxes? It is like 2.5TB 
on two fibre channel raid controllers. (14x180G drives, 7 per controller) 
for ~$10k. Im wondering about speed, and compatibility. I am assuming it 
is compatible with other systems, and the speed for simultaneous multiple 
read/writes will be slower but im wondering by how much. 

Sean



On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, Matt Graham wrote:

> On Saturday 15 February 2003 18:18, after a long battle with technology, 
> aSe wrote, in a message that should've been posted to the mailing list 
> at large:
> > Dances With Crows wrote:
> >> There are adapters (roughly $25 each) for normal IDE disks; the
> >> adapter plugs into the motherboard's IDE interface, you slide the
> >> drive into the adapter.  You can't do this with vanilla IDE disks. 
> >> (Well, you can try, but you'll probably hork up your system.)
> >
> > Really, I thought IDE wasn't able at all todo hot-swap. What do these
> > "adapters" actually do?
> 
> They present an interface to the motherboard IDE controllers that always 
> looks like an IDE disk of some type, since they have 2 IDE plugs on 
> them:  1 for the motherboard IDE cable, 1 for the drive, and a little 
> glue logic in between.  When a drive isn't plugged into them, they look 
> like a disk with 0 capacity.  When a drive is plugged into them, they 
> look like a disk with the capacity of the drive that was plugged in.  
> The adapters are not very complex, hence their low prices.
> 
> The machine's IDE subsystem is not aware that disks are getting swapped 
> in and out because IDE was not built to handle hotswapping--that's why 
> you have to do things with atacontrol or hdparm -RU.
> 
>