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Author Topic: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need  (Read 10793 times)

mouser

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I have some (internal) sata drive racks installed in my computer, they look like this:
drivebay.jpg

I'm a huge fan of such drive racks -- both internal if you have the space, or external in a usb enclosure if not.

My ASUS motherboard bios has some great options that let me mark these sata ports as hotswappable, which makes them normally show up in the normal windows tray icon where they can be "ejected" (hot-swapped) safely.

However, recently I made the "mistake" of installing updated Intel chipset sata drivers (because i thought i might want to try a raid setup), and it seems one of the known side effects/bugs of these drivers is that it hides the fact that certain ports were designated as hotswappable in bios.

In short -- the new drivers killed my ability to hotswap from my drive bays.

I was getting ready to rollback the new drivers when I came across this very excellent free tool called "HotSwap!", which basically sits in the system tray and restores the ability to hotswap sata drives:

hotswapscreenshot.png

The vast majority of you will have no use for this, but I thought it was worth a post in case someone else stumbles into the same scenario that I did.  One of those great little free utilities that can save your bacon if you ever need it.

HotSwap! website: http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

One tip: If you have multiple non-system hard drives, The default HotSwap! menu will show them *all* as hotswappable, but you can manually configure which drives are fixed so that they are not listed.

mwb1100

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2014, 05:44 PM »
USB Safely Remove also does this.  You might need to enable an option to "Display all storage devices".

Not free software, but I think it's popular so I thought I'd mention it for those who might already have it.

mouser

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #2 on: February 13, 2014, 07:28 PM »
Oh does it? I didn't know that -- that might be worth a look -- I thought it only handled USB devices.  If it does this as well as USB stuff, it might be worth me trying.

mouser

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #3 on: February 13, 2014, 08:51 PM »
Thanks for the tip mwb -- just tried Usb Safely Remove and you are right, it handles this scenario perfectly too.  :up:

Thanks also to Cranioscopical for his minireview here.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2014, 08:59 PM by mouser »

ewemoa

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #4 on: February 13, 2014, 11:00 PM »
Not having much luck getting through to the site for HotSwap.

Curt

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #5 on: February 14, 2014, 02:57 AM »
Not having much luck getting through to the site for HotSwap.

I am getting through without any delay.

---

HotSwap! has not been updated since June 2012, and USB-SR not since March 2013
- can one only assume maintenance?  :tellme:


ewemoa

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #6 on: February 14, 2014, 03:35 AM »
Thanks for the feedback -- still no luck here though.



I checked via host-tracker.com and they seem to get through from 17 locations (if IIUC).  So it looks like some problem on my end.



I can see their content via startpage's proxy feature.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2014, 03:41 AM by ewemoa »

Innuendo

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #7 on: February 15, 2014, 10:53 AM »
HotSwap! has not been updated since June 2012, and USB-SR not since March 2013
- can one only assume maintenance?  :tellme:

Can't speak for HotSwap!, but USB Safely Remove is only updated once per year, if that. The developer spends all his time on Zentimo, USB-SR's bigger brother and all new features will be put into Zentimo. However, it seems that these programs only have a certain, logical scope so I'm sure he's running out of features he can implement without bloat starting to creep in as he starts putting in features that are beyond the programs' realms of design.

[Statement of full disclosure: 1) I'm a registered Zentimo user. 2) I got it at a greatly discounted price. 3) I haven't bothered to install it on my system in a long time.]

Contro

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #8 on: February 15, 2014, 07:00 PM »
I have a huge desktop box.
Mozart Tx entertainment center (Thermaltake)
with 7 real internal disks......
 :-[ :-*
and an external universal docks to connect hard drives via usb.
 :P

mwb1100

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Re: HotSwap! A very cool free utility that most if you don't need
« Reply #9 on: February 15, 2014, 10:12 PM »
USB Safely Remove is only updated once per year, if that. The developer spends all his time on Zentimo, USB-SR's bigger brother and all new features will be put into Zentimo.

As far as I can tell, not much is being added to Zentimo either.  However, I'm a happy USB Safely Remove user and install it on all my machines.  It does what I bought it for, and does it very well.  So I have no complaints and no problem with the slow pace of updates - why do I need updates when it does what it's supposed to do?