how does windows handle hot swap drives?

[yesti]

Let's suppose I have a couple removable hard drive bays separate from the O/S disk that have the 'hot swap' board built it (from storcase/promise, etc.). They claim to let me hot swap drives while the system is on and not lose any data.

My question is how does windows handle the new disks when you put them in? Does it have to write a signature to the new drives (if they are brand new and never used with the system before)? Do they have to be of identical geometry (size, sectors, etc. I assume they do.)?

We want to use two large IDE drives as data dumps. They will be mirrored either by hardware or software (RAID 1) (any recommendations on which is better? I know I can do software raid in win2k server. I assume hardware raid is faster and puts less strain on system resources?). When they get full, we want to yank them out with windows still running and slap in two more drives and keep on dumping data to them. Can windows 2000 professional handle such a situation reliably and remain stable? Thanks.

 

[Magma76]

Hi!

We're currently migrating from NT4 & 2000 Server Domain to a Server 2003 forest! We're constantly removing hot swappable hard disks without any problems with 2000 so you should be OK. Saying that, all 40 of our Servers are Compaq (now HP), that may make a difference.

With regards to hardware and software RAID. Hardware RAID is the better option as it works. I have spoken to my boss and he has used software RAID in the past and one time when RAID 5 (with parity) was setup, one of the hard disks failed. Hardware RAID is basically more fault tollerant than it's software equivalent, and yes it would put less strain on your system.

If you put in a never-been-used before hard disk, you will still need to partition them etc.

In theory all you need to do with RAID 5 (with parity) is to insery a new hard disk and the data will re-build itself. It didnt! Ever since we have used hardware RAID!

 

[yesti]

Thanks for the reply. I briefly saw instructions on how to rebuild a raid-5 using windows software raid but I didn't read much further as that is not what we are doing. If you like, I can look for and post the info to see if there are special steps needed for that to work.

And for my situation, it is still hypothetical, we don't have to do it just yet. But it seems that it would be best to partition/signature the drives before needing to hot swap them so when the new ones are in I can just keep logging data? When I pull out a full drive and insert a new one, how do I tell windows that I have done so? Do I just hit F5 and the directory listing updates? Thanks.