Member Avatar for ggeoff

Hi

I have an Antec Easy Sata hotswop hardrive caddy. I have been using it with two hard drives. It seems that I need to restart Windows (version 7 running on a Dell 490 workstation) to get a replaced drive to be recognized. What seems to happen is th name of the most recent hard drive connected is remembered by the system rather than the system accessing the drive and using its label (drive name) I do not what I did but yesterday I couldn't get the computer to recognize that I had replaced the hard drive with another one. I could access the drive but its volume name was incorrect. The system wanted a check disk to be performed which I did. The 1TB drive took a long time and didn't present a completed report. I had to restart and found that the volume label of the drive had been reset to the defualt - "local". I checked and found that all the files were present plus the one from the other drive. that file was empty so I deleted it andd renamed the drive to what it should have been.

Does anyone know what should be the procedure for taking one drive out and replacing it with another? It would seem that all that needs to be done is to restart Windows. I think the trouble I had is because I shut down the computer rather than restarted it.

Geoff

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Member Avatar for adam_k

I never needed to hot swap disks, but you could try to go to computer management/Disk management and right click the disk and select offline. I don't know if windows will find your second disk and make it online or if you will have to make it online yourself.
If it works, it appears that you can create a script with diskpart.

Be warned: I haven't tried this and I wouldn't do it with 2 disks full with data I would miss if they were gone. BACK UP FIRST.

Member Avatar for ggeoff

@adam k I am using the Antec to backup video files. I have supplied the solution myself just restart Windows. The only criticism I have of the Antec enclosure is that there is not enough information supplied with it. It only requires some more printing. Incidentally, how else does one backup video? One project may have over 300GB of data. It seems to me that the Antec or other hotswop enclosure provides a cheap way of backing up large collections of files.

Member Avatar for adam_k

I would suggest to get yourself a big enough NAS (Network Attached Storage) and copy everything there.
I saves you the trouble of swapping disks and the risk of falling one of them or windows messing up your filesystem with repeated ejections and insertions.
They may have a slower speed, but NAS come with all options of RAID - which gives it the ability to repopulate a bad disk once replaced, without any loss of data - always depending on the type of RAID and the depth of your wallet.

Member Avatar for ggeoff

@adam k there is no problem. A NAS would cost 20 times as much as an Antec hotswop unit. And the Antec unit is only a little more than buying a hard drive mounting unit. All that is required is to backup video files to a removeable media which the Antec does.

Member Avatar for caperjack

building you nas storage[box] computer would not be that costly, first site built a 13tb one for 2500.00 alot but ,but a 1 oe 2 tb drive in a half decent computer will work just fine ,i have a dell complex 745,i paid 80.00 cdn for it , and one of the suggestion from the site i bought the tower on was to use a nas box ,

lots of info on line .
Click Here

Click Here

Edited by caperjack
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