Hello everyone,

I'm looking for a reliable SATA hot swap tray for a RAID assembly.

Ideally, it would be trayless, lockable, have a power switch, and power/activity lights.

I'm running Western Digital Green drives that hold data. It's not used for anything performance related, just keeping my data online, while I'm remote. Most of the time the drives are idle. So, with this in mind, I don't think it must have a fan. My case has plenty of cooling.

I'm looking at these two:

ISTARUSA
http://www.istarusa.com/rackmount_ch.../t-7m1-sa.aspx

KINGWIN
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817990001

Does anyone have any experience with these?

My concerns are:

ISTARUSA: noise, power (My drives are mostly idle), enclosed HDD/fan failure (Will the failure of the fan overheat the drive if it is under load?)

KINGWIN: Mixed reviews, mostly positive. It's trayless and the connection/loading has been called into question. Also there have been reports of inconsistant data transfer rates. I will mount these with screws so the tooless installation problem is not a concern.

Ideally, I would go with the Kingwin. It's cheaper, quieter, consumes, less power and has an open enclosure so it is no more likely to overheat than normal. The only real concern is the connection/quality. If the connection goes during a write, how bad would that be for my raid? (most likely scenario, worse possible senario)

(My data is backed-up.)

If anyone has another candidate, I'm all ears. I would only like 1 x HDD enclosers, however. The multiple HDD enclosers seem to be a single point of failure.

Thanks for input!

Regards,
WT

Keep in mind that your MB (or card) also has to support hot swapping)last I checked most do not). If it does not, you can burn up MBs and/or HDs if you try it anyway.

I have AHCI support on my MB. Is that enough to support hot swap?

Thanks,
WT

You will have to check you motherboard manual, but generally no.

The manual for the GA-EP45-UD3R only mentions the following under SATA AHCI Mode (Intel ICH10 Southbridge):

(Note)
AHCI Configures the SATA controllers to AHCI mode. Advanced Host Controller Interface
(AHCI) is an interface specification that allows the storage driver to enable
advanced Serial ATA features such as Native Command Queuing and hot plug.

Other sites have said the board supports hot-swap, but nothing on the official site. Has anyone used this board and can confirm?

Also, if you can recommend a tray from the above that would be helpful as well.

Thanks,
WT

In case anyone else is checking on the same motherboard, the below came from GIGABYTE support:

Answer - 828569
Answer : Dear customer,
Yes, EP45-UD3R is Intel ICH10R chipset it is SATA hot swap capable, the other GSATA controller onboard does too.
Question - 828569
From :
Sent : 10/29/2009 06:34
Question : Does the GA-EP45-UD3R rev 1.1 support hot swapping SATA drives on the SATA controllers? If so, is it true for both? I've seen talk of it online, but nothing in the user's manual.

Thanks,



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model Name : GA-EP45-UD3R(rev. 1.1)
--------------------------
M/B Rev : 1.1
BIOS Ver : F4
Serial No. :
Purchase Dealer :
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VGA Brand : Model :
CPU Brand : Model : Speed :
Operation System : SP :
Memory Brand : Type :
Memory Size : Speed :
Power Supply : W

Probably Gigabyte assumes you are running Windows, so the drivers for Windows does support hot swap. For Linux, that is a different story. For hot swap to work in Linux the module or driver have to support it and you have to know the hot swap sequence to add and remove the hard drive.

I think the following will be a better configuration to store a lot of data with out thinking if the controller supports hot swap or messing around with software RAID and you will be able to know the status of each hard drive although you have to worry if the controller supports port multipliers.

ICY DOCK MB674SPF-B - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817994061
Addonics 4X1 eSATA/USB Hardware Port Multiplier (HPM) - with integrated RAID controller - http://www.addonics.com/products/hos...d4sr5hpmus.asp

The problem using trayless is not all hard drives puts the connector in the standard location, so a tray have to be used. Usually Seagate and Maxtor has this problem. Others are OK.

Using a multi-bay enclosure is not bad if the hard drives are not removed a lot.

Sure your computer has plenty of cooling because that is what everybody says when they are running a multiple hard drive setup. I would say the following case has enough air flow from the huge side fan to handle several hard drives.

AeroCool S9 Pro - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811196032

Make sure your Internet connection has a high upload bandwidth because this will limit your plans.

Thanks for the info. I prefer to use the linux software raid, so that if a card dies, is discontinued, or just want to migrate to another machine, etc. there is no compatibility issue. This machine is pretty much allocated to run the RAID.

Would you (or anyone else out there) be able to provide a resource to learn what one would need to do, if they wanted to implement sata hot-swap on a linux box?

As far as the Icy Dock unit, I don't want to go with a multiple HDD unit because it seems like a single point of failure.

Thank you for your advice, I definitely don't want to fry my board (or anything else).

Kind regards,
WT