Effecting hot-plugging

[Sebastian42]

If a PC (Bios 2011) appears not to support hot-plugging, is some remedy available short of replacing the motherboard ? [By hot-plugging I mean connecting a SATA hard drive and having it detected and accessible without the need to reboot the PC]

[Geek-9pm]

Shot answer, Yes.
Long answer has some complications. You may 'Hot" swap a SATA  rive that has the hardware and software stuff needed. Such a drive might be called a eSATA.
Perhaps this might help:

Five eSATA Drives Reviewed

...because today, we’re watching the much more modern USB 2.0 port, as a data conduit, reach the end of its life. As a connector for peripherals it’s fine, but after you read this report, you’ll realize that external-serial ATA, or eSATA, is the future of the external hard drive connection.

Normally you would not use the eSATA as your system drive. It is mostly for backup. Also, you must take care about having some program depending on the presence of the removable drive. You must close such a program before you remove the eSATA drive.

[Sebastian42]

I have heard of eSATA; unless HDDs have that without me knowing it, I would say eSATA is NOT essential. I have hot swapped 'ordinary' HDDs in one computer, but been unable to hot swap them in another.  So I think it is a PC feature (motherboard ? BIOS ?) rather than a HDD feature. I'm wondering if there is software or a tweak that can convert a non-hot-swapping into a hot-swapping PC ?

[camerongray]

For hot swap you first of all need to make sure the BIOS is set to AHCI mode for the SATA ports and not IDE/Legacy mode.  You'd also generally want to be using some sort of hot swap backplane/tray assembly rather than be manually disconnecting and reconnecting the cables (although using the cables directly should still work in theory).  Also make sure you have installed the SATA drivers from your motherboard manufacturer.

Beyond that, you could potentially get a decent SATA/SAS controller card that explicitly supports hot swap and use this with your current motherboard rather than replacing it.  I'd personally go for a proper server grade controller from a company like LSI or Adaptec which are often fairly cheap on the used/refurbished market rather than buying one of those cheap Dynamode/Startech things.

[Sebastian42]

I have found an ICH SATA control mode set to IDE, so changed that to ACHI. No immediate improvement, as I got "we've run into a problem and will, restart your PC" But one way or another that will get resolved in time.

"rather than be manually disconnecting and reconnecting the cables' I have much SUCCESSFUL experience in doing JUST THAT, but did eventually invest in SATA-power switches - a checkered history there, which is probably not appropriate to THIS thread, but makes interesting reading in another 'context'.

When my PC eventually recovers, I 'll see if 'MY' problem is solved or whether I need to act on your second paragraph. I'll keep you posted.

[Sebastian42]

The RESTART problem was probably coincidental and not connected to changing the BIOS setting. With a different HDD and contents, the PC booted and, sure enough with hot-plugging enabled. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

[Sebastian42]

I clicked on 'topic solved' at the bottom of this page, but can not see that it had any effect.