Re: Command To Allow Safe Removal of Hard Drive?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

"Edwin vMierlo [MVP]" <EdwinvMierlo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:e%23%23mhk5cIHA.4712@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
let me jump in here :

"appropriately designed hardware"

True

This is actually a driver issue

Also True

If you run hot-swapable hardware, but the driver does not support it, and
you still "hot-swap" you might get into trouble.
If you run non-hot-swapable hardware, but manage to load a driver which
supports it, you also might get into trouble.

With trouble I mean, data corruption or even physical/electrical damage to
your equipment.

It is the combination folks, both hardware and driver must support
hot-swap
or "safely remove".
If that option is not offered to you or if you are not sure if your
hardware
is hot-swapable, then you must contact the hardware manufacturer for
support
or any other queries.

For consumer devices that are intended to contantly be inserted and removed,
you can understand why the vendor implements a driver specifically to
support hot swapping. Hot swapping is the primary intended usage.

But for a SCSI hard drive that is mounted JBOD on a hotswap bus, I don't
think you can expect a vendor to provide a driver to make the drive safe to
dismount. Most don't have the time or budget for it since its not a
common use case. The Compaq's and Dell's of the world are focused on
implementing robust hardware RAID and don't want to be bothered by someone
putting in a few JBOD drives into their non RAID enclosures just to grab a
quick backup to disk.

I would expect Microsoft to think through when someone might have a
legitimate need to disconnect a SCSI hotswap JBOD drive from the system and
provide a generic mechanism for that, as a catch all for devices that don't
have custom drivers for removal. I think a consideration of such usage
would show plenty of legitimate use cases. And if Microsoft is trusting an
administrative user to delete the volume, then I don't see why the same user
cannot be trusted to disconnect that volume from the OS. Disconnecting a
drive by mistake is a LOT less serious than deleting the volume by mistake.

--
Will



.

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