[Tfug] OT: Disk testing

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Brian,

--- Brian Murphy <murphy+tfug at email.arizona.edu>
wrote:

> Wow, you guys are making this hard.
> What you need is something like this:
>
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=UltraTrak&product_id=131

Sure seems like an expensive replacement for a
(surplus) PC!  :>

> The only requirement of yours that it doesn't pass
> is hot-plug.

And, it's not "on-the-cheap"  :>  If you wanted
to do more than 4 drives at a time, you'd have to
buy yet another of them, etc.

> You'll be hard pressed to find something like that
> because the PATA protocol doesn't support hot
> swapping.

There's nothing that precludes hot swapping.
You just need to know when the drive MAY have been
swapped out and reissue an INITIALIZE command
for the appropriate geometry.

However, this typically poses a problem for the PC
approach -- because PC's bury this in the POST
and usually can't reconfigure their BIOS at run
time to support changes in drive geometries, etc.
It's the MS mentality of rebooting the PC after
every little change  :<

OTOH, running on bare metal, all things are
possible  :>

> You're stuck with USB or Firewire single
> drive enclosures for cheap hot swapping.

Seems I heard mention of that approach before... :>
Actually, with a bit of $$, you could buy IDE-SCSI
adapters and use an existing SCSI hot-swap JBOD
to get the perfect solution.  But, those adapters
aren't free *and* usually make mounting the disk
in a generic JBOD problematic -- the disk+adapter
has too large a footprint... though often "just
by a little"

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