Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

On about 99% of all the systems I've ever worked on, true "hot swapping" (as defined below) has never worked reliably with Glyph/Rourke/Kingston hardware and a Macintosh. I have always had trouble - crashes, drives failing to appear, system gets sluggish, etc when hot swapping as defined below. There are a few workarounds and tricks I know of to "get by" for a while - but in my experience, hot swapping a drive means restarting. Also, in my experience, people who do hot swap all the time end up experiencing the most horrific drive failures - directory corruption etc...so anyway - I thought I'd take a poll:

Hot swap defined:

1) You have a drive mounted on the desktop.
2) You select the drive icon and press command-Y (put away), or you drag it to the trash.
3) You click OK in the confirmation dialog to remove the drive from the desktop.
4) You turn the key on the Kingston tray and remove the drive.
5) You put in the new drive and turn the key to spin it up.
6) You launch FWB Mounter, SCSIProbe, etc - the software sees the drive on the SCSI buss, and you are able to mount the drive on the desktop.
7) You continue working, without needing to restart and without experiencing ANY performance problems or crashes or other bizarre behavior.

Does hot swapping work this way for ANYBODY on the planet? Everyone - please reply!

Thanks!

http://www.digidesign.com/ubb/images/icons/smile.gif

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

We have a Glyph setup with a 9 gig fixed, and one swap tray. We are currently using several 9 gig bricks for different projects. We are however going to all 18 gig bricks so as to fit entire projects on one brick.
But as to your question, yes, it works very well for us.
The only problems we have ever experianced were
1- Finder quitting whenever we attempted to move files from one drive to another, changing cahche size fixed that.
2- One time the mac crashed for no aparent reason, and we lost the drive. But in 1 year, those were the only two problems we have had.
HOWEVER, we NEVER swap drives with the mac on. We ALWAYS power down, unlock, swap, replace and boot back up. It is a minor inconvenience at most to ensure no problems. I guess many people, try to use only the swap drives for a project, therefore need to swap in the middle of a session. That was the reason we went with the fixed also in the first place. So if we ran out during a session, we could just re-direct the files to the fixed.
Works great for us!
Hope that answered your question.
j

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

Doctor,

I've used these drives reliably on a variety of systems. The only problem I've ever encountered is when you forget to remove the old drive icon from the desktop before you swap the drives and spin the new one back up. This (understandably) confuses things. You learn not to do this very quickly.

Garry Rindfuss

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

Hi all
Although I don't really LIKE hot-swap drives (noisy, heavy, etc.) the procedure Disco Doctor listed works for me almost all the time. I use Kingston DataSilo chassis' and Seagate drives (narrow) in Kingston carriers. That's another reason I don't like hot-swap, because the drives that come to me are drives from or for a Tascam MMR-8 or MMP-16, but that's not really hot-swap's fault.Also, sometimes/often when I'm on a rental system, and not my own, dragging (or command-Y-ing) a drive to the Trash will crash the system, so maybe it's a system thing? Or maybe I'm just lucky. Hope this helps

------------------
Joe Milner
Puget Sound
Los Angeles

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

I have 2 Glyph Hot swap racks, a 4x trip and a 2x rack. Several 9 gig wide drives. I can usually hot swap 2 or 3 times before I experience major slow down in performance. And then sometimes lockup.

Have found that dragging drive to trash is better than using FWB (or other) Unmount.

My 4x Trip rack is 2x wide and 2x Narrow. Interestingly I recently did a gig where I was using wide drives in narrow cases and was able to hotswap in the narrow bays many many times over a period of 3 days and nights (my computer was on the whole time) without experiencing any problems.

Ash.

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

Disco - Nuthin' but problems! Carefully obeying all the rules, still get the occasional blown directory, and after dismounting, removing drive #1, mounting drive #2, dismounting and removing #2, I have not been able to get drive #1 remounted without a restart. These are 18G Cheetahs in Glyph hot-swaps on a 9600 with Adaptec card.

Rich

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

I use FWB Mounter to mount and "unmount the drives." Never have any problems.

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

You already know my story...

I can hot swap 99% of the time. But I have found the most reliable way is to run the mounter before the new drive has been spun up and re scan after it has spun up (resetting the SCSI buss), then mounting. Even though I can hot swap this way almost every time, ever since ProTools 5.0, hot swapped drives will playback as digital noise in ProTools until a restart. Back when I ran PT 4.31, I used to hot swap all day without any problems. Now if I'm working with ProTools I don't bother.

sm

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

disco

ever since i changed from Glyph to Rorke - hot swapping worked way better. i know there are internal settings on jumpers that can affect the hot capability and other factors - but paying a little more at AID in LA has made my hard drive life worth the money. so yes, i hot swap ALL the time with cheetah 18 lvds/kingston/rorkes and they just haven't crashed. the worst problem is the key doesn't lock in place. (where as the glyph was always prettier)

good luck

Re: Does \"hot swapping\" actually work for you?
 

I do "hot swapping" as you describe every day. We have about 12 hard drives set up for use this way. With past versions of Pro Tools, I had to quit Pro Tools before I mounted a new drive. I never had to restart the computer though. Currently I am running Pro Tools 5.0.1 and I do not have to quit Pro Tools before I mount a new drive.

I use CRU DataPort cartridges with IBM hard drives.
www.cruinc.com