Solved Can't Unmount Hot-Swap Drive

[Leo625]

I have a generic (which means I don't know the mfgr.) drive bay that I bought to enable me to hot-swap hdds. For a few years it would show up in Win7 as a USB type connection even though this device is plugged into one of the 4 SATA connectors on my Gigabyte X470 AORUS Gaming 7 WiFi board. When it showed up this way I could choose to shut down the connection before I removed the hdd from the bay but in the last year or so Win 7 doesn't recognize drives I plug into the drive bay as USB. Therefore when I wish to remove a drive from the drive bay I just close my eyes and pull. I got curious after reading another thread on this type shenanigan with Windows 7 and wondered now, since the drive shows up in Disk Management as one of 4 HDDs if anyone has a better solution to stop and unmount the drive.

 

[iko22]

Hello Leo625

SATA and USB are two different interfaces. USB allows Plug and Play while SATA, if the computer has the right hardware, allows Hot Swap. Like you already have said, you require a drive bay that allows Hot Swap in the first place. Then you also need to set the disks as RAID/AHCI, as IDE does not allow Hot Swap. Then finally, you may also need to find some kind of Enable Hot Swap functionality in BIOS menu before it can become usable.

 

[Megahertz07]

I don't know why it showed as USB as it is a SATA connection.
On BIOS, the SATA port used by the caddy must be set as Hot Swap.
Under Windows, open explorer, right click on the drive. On the menu should be an option to Eject.

 

[Leo625]

Okay Thank You Guys! Yeah, very puzzling but I appreciate your answers and will post back when I figure out a solution with what you provided.


Thanks, Leo625

 

[Leo625]

Well, so far I haven't had any luck using Windows Explorer or BIOS as far as shutting down a hard drive that is in a rack designed to allow removal. Not good. I have a question posted on Amazon about this. Maybe someone there knows. I couldn't find anything in the BIOS that designates that port to be Hot Swapped. Wow. And this is a pretty pricey board! I may just find a SATA pinout diagram and install a power button on the rack to kill the drive power for removal. Can't imagine that would hurt anything.

 

[iko22]

If you find no other available option, you can just Power Off computer, then swap out your HDDs, then Power Up the PC again, and that wouldn't hurt anything. However, just killing the Power on an Internal SATA drive will likely cause the computer to BSOD - and I am talking from experience of using HDD racks, similar to yours, on non-compliant motherboards.

 

[Leo625]

Yikes! That's good to know, Thanks iko22! Well looks like I'll just have to learn to live with it then. I'm going to poke around in the BIOS again. Maybe I missed something.

 

[Leo625]

iko22 or anyone who might know. If you turn off the power to a hard drive is there enough left in a capacitor or something inside the drive that it parks the heads? I have been thinking of putting an on/off switch to the power on my hard drive. One that won't spark so no chance of voltage surge.
It seems to me if one turns off a hard drive it would be no different than a power outage. I have never heard anyone say to be extra careful when restarting your computer from power outage to prevent hard drive damage so assume the heads still have access to enough energy to park. Any thoughts?

 

[iko22]

Parking disks is not the problem nowadays, compared to MS-DOS days.
Nowadays disks can internally auto-park themselves, on power loss. Back in the MS-DOS days, the user had to issue the PARK command to park the disks.
Incidentally, Parking disks was only an issue should you wish to physically move the disk after Power Off. If you don't move the computer/disks, then Parking them is not a worry.

 

[Leo625]

Okay Thanks iko22. I think I will try out this on/off switch and let you guys know how it works. Still kinda stunned my $250+ MB doesn't support hot-swapping but it is what it is.