Yes SATA drives can be used in a hot swap configuration BUT this is 
controlled by the SATA controller not the drives. You also need the 
drives mounted on sleds that fit in to a disk array.
The use of hot swap drives is best used with RAID 5 (stripping with 
parity) where many drives make a very large volume.
It is also used in Mirrored configurations, again it's best to use 
hardware not software for this. Hardware raid is faster then software 
raid in any case. I know I'll get flamed for that last comment.

Sam.


Jon Schewe wrote:

> Has anyone tried this with a regular SATA card, mine is a Promise 
> TX-4?  I was wondering if I could just open up my case and plug in a 
> SATA drive to my extra power and data cables while the system is live 
> (since SATA is supposed to have this hot-swap ability) and get Linux 
> to recognize the drive.
>
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