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removeable SATA drive

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5 replies

by bowieb 1 view

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I am considering building a server with either Fedora or CentOS to do backups of some other servers. This box would have an SATA drive in a removable enclosure. The question is: is it possible to do the following without having to power down the server?

- umount the removable drive
- remove the drive and replace it with a different one
- mount the new drive

Or will I have to restart the system for Linux to recognize that I have changed out the drive?

5 replies

by thechas

The first step is to look into the specifications of the SATA controller in detail.

If the SATA controller supports hot swapping, you are most of the way there.

Before Linux or any other OS can recognize a new drive, the controller for the drive needs to report that it sees a new drive.

If this is a true server chassis with SATA support on board, you should be fine.

However, if the controller only poles the drives at boot, you will not be successful with your hot swapping.

Chas

by bowieb

So this is a hardware issue... I'll look at the specs for my motherboard. Thanks

by jaqui

as long as the removable drive is set to allow regular users to unmount and mount, then anyone with access to hardware can change drive without needing sysamin ( root ) access.

before pulling drive:
unmount /dev/hd(whichever is correct a/b/c/d)
after changing drive:
mount /dev/hd(whichever is correct a/b/c/d)

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