EliteDesk 800 G2-Tower SATA hot-plug possible?

[ttv]

Hi,

i just bought a EliteDesk 800 G2-Tower, running Win7 64Bit Pro with latest drivers (Intel Rapid Storage 15.9.0.1015 on Intel(R) 100 Series/C230 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller), RAID-Mode disabled in BIOS (latest version).

My question is why am i unable to set the SATA-ports to eSATA and why cant i use the hot-plug feature of the AHCI-controller? I guess the chipset must be able to handle these features or am i wrong at this point?

Regards,

Johannes

[DGroves]

not all intel motherboards/chipsets support hotswap or eSATA features also the same applys to the RST software some builds will not support it

you can however use a 3rd party program called "Hot Swap!" it works fine on windows 10 32/64 bit os's

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

download link is  at top left of page

once installed and options configured, you simply left click on the task bar icon

and select the device you wish to unmount/hotswap the program will then flush/write all data to disk before unmounting it in the OS

[ttv]

Hi DGroves,

thank you for stepping in.

I already had "Hot Swap!" but unfortunatly this great piece of software doesent give me the ability to hotplug my hdds.

How can i find out if the board in my computer is able to hotplug at the sata-ports? I cant find any information in the hp-documents if that is possible or not.

Regards,

Johannes

[DGroves]

i would put this question directly to HP tech support, this is just a peer to peer user  forum and we lack the hardware specs to give you a  answer

any test i can think of to try to determine hotswap ability runs the risk of damaging hardware or corupting data, and this is a rather new system that is expensive to replace a motherboard on so i would not take the chance and simply email hp support on this.

i do not recomend contacting hp by voice as most phone techs can only read the online documentation that hp makes available online in most cases and in your case you really need a tech engineer who can answer your hardware related question  Good luck!!

also i don't think you understand what hotswap does:

hotswap simply flushes/writes the data on the selected drive's buffer before powering the drive down.

in the powered down state you can then remove  and/or replace the drive with another sata device  and when the powered down device is disconnected/reconnected if will then re register in the os

i use hotswap on a trayless 3.5 drive bracket and swap drives all the time in the os without rebooting

[ttv]

Thats exactly the problem. I Already talked to the hotline and the guy there just said the he cant find any documentation on this an bacause of that he guesses that its not possible...

But where can i find the hp support mail? If i check the supportassistant i only get the phonenumbers.

Iny idea?

Regards,

Johannes

[ttv]

Hi again,

ok maybe i missed something.

I got a hdd in a sharkoon quickport, connected to esata slotplate (same setup works fine on our worstations z400 / z440), connected to sata onboard. even with "Hot Swap!" win7 wont find the new connected hdd. After reboot its there an i can spin down & power it of with "Hot Swap!", but iam still unable to connect it while running the pc.

are you running your setup on win7 64 pro too?

Regards,

Johannes

[SDH]

Johannes,

Not sure if this will help you at all..... it may be that HP would have to do a BIOS update to enable eSATA, for example, with your hardware.

In our Z600 Z400 workstations I found that my "hot swap" or hot plugging capability only was active when I configured the SATA port I plugged my backplane SATA-to-eSATA adapter into was set to "eSATA " mode in BIOS.  If that was left in the default SATA mode in BIOS hot plugging would not work.  That BIOS option was only available for the last two SATA ports of these ZX00 workstations.

I noted that some of my external eSATA drives seem more compatible with this feature than others, likely due to differences in the bridge electronics built into the the external drive case.  Maybe also drive to drive..... I've got external cases with a HDD or a SSD.

I'm guessing here, but the variable success may be why HP does not "support" or document this capability in these workstations.  For me it is almost always successful.

So, go into your documentation and see if there is this feature in BIOS.... converting one or more of the SATA ports to eSATA mode.... and if so try that.

[DGroves]

and a FYI,...on my z800 and z820 i can leave the bios options to default and have the HotSwap! program work fine on any

of the Intel SATA or LSI SAS/SATA ports without selecting the eSATA option in the bios and i have used WD/Seagate/Maxtor

drives in my removable bay

note my removable bay is a 5.25 one that supports one 3.5 and a 2.5 SSD at the same time due to it having seperate trays for each size and a seperate data cable for each tray

this model tray was not cheap compared to the models that only have one bay for either size and  was worth the money

in my case as i  needed to pull data off both size formats quite often

as i and SDH have said/noted HotSwap compatability seems to be dependant on chipset/bios/RST driver rev and if one of them is lacking then the hotswap feature will not work

Last, if you need the hotswap feature allmost any current non intel PCI-e  sata card will have support for hotswap and many are sold as eSATA cards that do list hotswap as a fully supported feature

[ttv]

DGroves and SDH - thanks for supporting me!

Here is a weird one: If i boot the System with HDDs connected to the eSATA ports, Windows recognizes them. Thats not the news, but now i can disconnect the drives with Hotswap! and after that i am able to hotplug these drives again. Seems that Hotplug! or Windows remeber the drives connected before. But iam still unable to hotplug "new" drives. So maybe boot with every external HDD and leave a fingerprint in the system is a workaround, but its kind of stupid..

Regards

Johannes

[DGroves]

windows does store/cache a list of last used drives, so i'm not suprised at this

i am somewhat stumped as to why you are unable to "see" new eSATA drives that were not connected during boot and cached in the OS we used to connect a drive Data, then power connector , and then go to "manage" \disk managment and tell it to scan for new devices to make the new drive show up

however we no longer have to do this on our current hardware, as hotswap will trigger the OS to do a new drive scan

also most windows utilities that clean or fix errors will flush this drive cache, so if you use any util like this don't be supprised iff your cached list is gone after running a util like this (CrapCleaner, wise registry scanner/fixer)