Anyway to enable hot swapping in Mac Pros with Apple RAID Card?

[iamcheerful]

Anyone able to create a workaround w/o getting a 3rd party card?

Serial ATA Info

1) Unlike PATA, both SATA and eSATA support hot-swapping by design. However, this feature requires proper support at the host, device (drive), and operating-system level. In general, all SATA devices (drives) support hot-swapping (due to the requirements on the device-side), but requisite support is less common on SATA host adapters.

2) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is designed for hot-swapping.

Mac Pro RAID Card and Xserve RAID Card

a) Answer: All hard drives in the Xserve product line are hot-swappable; all hard drives in the Mac Pro product line are not hot-swappable.

 

[nanofrog]

There's actually two parts to it.
1. Hot Swap (data). OS X client doesn't support it.
2. Hot Plug (drive power). MP's don't have the needed circuit (inrush current limiter).

So unfortunately, it's not possible unless you add in the circuit, and run OS X Server.

 

[iamcheerful]

nanofrog, thank you for the information. indeed unfortunately ... i'm sure many of us would love to be able to 'mod' it to have hotswap. seems i really need to get an Xserve if I want to have an Apple solution.

 

[nanofrog]

nanofrog, thank you for the information. indeed unfortunately ... i'm sure many of us would love to be able to 'mod' it to have hotswap. seems i really need to get an Xserve if I want to have an Apple solution.

No problem.

I wish there was better news, but not ATM.