Why Does Hot Swapping HDD's Never Seem to Work Anymore?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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So i’ve got tons of HDD’s laying around my house which I often move between computers, and for whatever reason, two “new” computers that I got recently don’t seem to want to ever hot-swap HDD’s, and it’s super annoying. They are my HP Z420 (with two different SAS controllers, more on that later), and Lenovo M93P.

For my HP Z420, I’ve tried two different PCIe based SAS raid controllers, both set to JBOD, and neither allow for hot swapping HDD’s. Whenever I try to hot swap the drives, disk management continues to show the drive which was removed still “available” to the system, or when I install a new drive, disk management doesn’t acknowledge a new drive has been installed. The controllers I’m using are the HP P212, and an AMCC 9650SE (8 port). I haven’t tried the onboard sas controller yet, because I have no plans to use it (not enough sata ports for me). This is running Win 10 Enterprise LTSB.

For my M93P, same thing happens; disk management continues to show the drive which was removed still “available” to the system, or when I install a new drive, disk management doesn’t acknowledge a new drive has been installed. However, in this case, the drive is connected via sata to the onboard controller. This is running Win 8.1 pro.

In both systems, the HDD spins up, and upon restarting the computer, the drive is then recognized by the system, however, once I disconnect the drive from the system, once again, the system doesn’t acknowledge that it has disappeared. Also, in both systems bios/UEFI, neither have an option to enable or disable hot-swap (my old Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 had that the option).

Honestly, I’m stuck. I really need hot swap to work, and it doesn’t seem to want to, and it’s annoying. Any help/suggestions is greatly welcomed!

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It should be supported by the motherboard to be present.
Both of your machines don’t have it or at least I couldn’t find it in their spec sheets.
It is not present most probably because of security reasons.

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Because its windows and windows is garbage for hotswapping everytime ive tried.

1 Like
4

The motherboard has to support hotswapping as much as the OS has to.

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Most motherboards do support hotswapping nowadays (so in the past 5-6 years), but you need to enable it in the BIOS as it’s usually disabled by default.

That being said, Windows is rubbish when it comes to hotswapping indeed. I often have to go to Control Panel -> Device Manager and tell it to scan for hardware changes.

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WIn 8.1 and 10 both support hot-swap HDD I am 100% sure it is his motherboard also I did check the manuals for both. They are enterprise/business machines so it is probably a security measurement.

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Ah yeah, that could explain it

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So from most peoples replies, it seems like it’s a “security” feature which cannot be disabled (stupid).

Would any SAS/Sata cards be able to bypass the motherboard limitation, and actually pass the HDD info to the O.S, or am I practically fucked?

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I’ve found that often times I have to initialize even single disks when using RAID cards.

I think most RAID cards have “physical disks” and “virtual disks”, and a physical drive must be assigned to a virtual disk in the RAID card’s config to show up as a logical disk to an OS. Restarting the system might be enough to do this as the RAID controller would need to initialize all it’s disks again.

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Trying to avoid having to do this, considering my server will be used to host many VM’s, hence why I want hot-swap to just work.