Can secondary IDE/SCSI hard drives be hot swapped?

[r3flex]

Can secondary (non-RAID configured) IDE and/or SCSI hard drives be hot swapped without dire consequences under Linux? If so, how is it done (and are there any particular hardware/driver/software requirements)?

[YaRness]

i'm almost certain it always takes particular hardware (at least) to hotswap drives on either bus.

we use hard drive enclosures that slide into a bay, these can sort of be hot swapped, the bay is turned off first, and then you can change drives.

standardly speaking though, drives on IDE and scsi can't be hot swapped.

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[r3flex]

Allow me to clarify the hardware situation a bit..

I'd like to be able to hot swap two secondary drives, one being IDE, connected to its own dedicated channel, either directly plugged into an Abit KT7 motherboard, or to a Promise Ultra66 PCI card. The other is a SCSI drive, connected to a tekram DC-390U2W SCSI card.

I'm currently planning on picking up a couple of DataPort VII frame & cartridge kits from megahaus.com (unless someone knows of a better vendor and/or brand/model?) to enclose the drives within.

YaRness mentioned:

we use hard drive enclosures that slide into a bay, these can sort of be hot swapped, the bay is turned off first, and then you can change drives.


So only the hard drive bay is turned off, and the rest of the system remains power on and operational? Can you (at that point) replace that deactivated drive with a different drive (within the appropriate enclosure), power it back up, and have the system recognize the newly added hard drive, such that it be able to read & write to it without any problems?