I have a hyperv 2012 r2 server, and the case has two bays where you can open a drawer and slide in a bare SATA drive. Theres a data and power connector at the back of the bay with cables to connect to sata card or motherboard inside the case, as well as power from the power supply.
I'm pretty sure SATA is hot pluggable so I can insert the drive with the system running. My question is how do I safely remove the drive? I assume hardware wise this is part of being hot swappable, but how will Windows respond and how can I be sure nothing is in cache waiting to be written?
I'm hoping to be able to swap drives so the SBS 2011 guest VM can use the drives for backup.
The Mb is an Asus kgpe-d16, the drive bays are called xdock bays as part of a cooler master cosmos 2 case. The drives I am planning on using are wd 2tb red naps.
The manual for the Mb and raid controller both say they support hot swap, so my question is mainly how do I ensure windows is no longer using the drive, similar to the safely remove hardware icon you'd have in a full windows install.
Best Answer
As long as the drive isn't part of an active RAID array, not in RAID 0, and not being accessed at the time, you should be able to replace failed drives no problem. SATA is hot-pluggable and hot-swappable.
Are you using a hardware RAID controller, or the fake RAID built-in to some motherboards?