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4089
February 23rd, 2017 10:00
Can Optiplex 990 hot swap SATA drives?
Hello,
I installed sliding sata bays into my Optiplex 990 and found that my inserted drives are not hot-swappable. Meaning, if I insert the drive then reboot the system the inserted drives are seen but I cannot unmount an inserted drive, remove it then plug in a different drive in it's place. The system simply cannot see it. It appears to be a BIOS problem? Almost like the BIOS "turns off" the sata ports at boot if nothing is plugged into them at boot? The crazy-making part is if I have a drive plugged in during boot, unmount it then reinsert the same drive it will work but a different drive does not.
I have already set my BIOS to AHCI and did a fresh OS install.
I have already updated my BIOS to A19
The other crazy thing is I used to do this just fine on my old Optiplex 740 and never had trouble.
The hard drive used to be part of a RAID 1 array on this computer. Is it possible there is still some sort of RAID information lurking on the disk that is causing this trouble?
Thanks.
speedstep
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47K Posts
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February 24th, 2017 08:00
INTEL RST is not a dedicated raid controller and does not support hot swapping. They also do not support raid containers larger than 2TB.
OEMs/motherboard manufacturers must enable hot swap capability in the system BIOS. This is not the case with the 990.
This is not a feature in the 990 its not a server.
Even with a dedicated controller hot swapping DOES NOT and WILL NOT EVER work if the swapped drive is not already partitioned and formatted by the controller.
Furthermore there are "signatures" on the drive as to which "SLOT" aka Drive 0 1 2 3 4 5 it is based on that formatting. Willy Nilly swapping drive positions is also NOT SUPPORTED
rickm123
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February 24th, 2017 09:00
Thank you SpeedStep for the answer. I understand the 990 is not a server and as such is limited. I already knew about the 2TB limit but thank you for the information on the INTEL RST and any add-on controller.
I did intended to use it as a Linux box for "willy nilly" swapping drives for data rescue/dd purposes. I had believed the whole point of AHCI was to support hot swapping (and native command queuing) but I guess this is not always the case.
I will go back to using my Optiplex 740 which does support hot swapping until I find a better computer for this purpose.
speedstep
9 Legend
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47K Posts
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February 24th, 2017 11:00
The 740 is AMD CPU and NFORCE Chipset. Which is totally different from an INTEL Chipset and INTEL RST Raid.