Hey there,
I am going to create a 2-bay mirror using ZFS on Linux. My motherboard’s SATA controller has hotplug support which might be benefitial in case I have to replace a drive in future. However, does enabling hotplug support introduce any performance disadvantage? Do I need to enable hotplug support at all when I take drives offline via command line?
The board is an ASUS Maximus VIII Gene (Z170 chipset).
Thanks in advance!
Can you even disable the AHCI mode in UEFI anymore?
Hotplug is in the end just a feature set so it doesn’t give you any performance decrease/disadvantage.
There is options for either AHCI or RAID based on Intel Rapid Storage Technology. However, the BIOS allows to enable/disable hotplug support for each port indivdually. I wonder why unless there is any downsides involved.
That’s a neat feature.
There are now downsides I know of.
There is no performance impact from having hotplug enabled.
Enjoy 
Very good! Thanks everyone for clearing it up.