Question about hot swapping and Jbods

So I’m completely unfamiliar with hot swapping harddrives, never had much need for it.

But my current plan is to install 2x hotswap 3.5" bays in my 5.25 slots of my plotter so that I can easily transfer it to the USB Jbod that I’m getting, or any other farmer I might get later.

But I’ve always understood that ripping out a hdd while it’s in use is a very bad idea, so how exactly does this work. Do you fist have to disable the drive in the Os somehow, or is it enough if it is just not being used at that moment?

Of course I can just plot straight to the USB drives but I want to build in a little flexibility for other things that may or may not follow later on. Space in my apartment is quite limited so if I get more storage I might want to dumpt it into a family members house :joy:

Other question is about the options for attaching storage. Jbod’s aren’t cheap at all. Sas ones can be found second hand at better prices but often intended for server racks so I guess you would still need power supply for the sata power? an external sas controller and cables, so in the end I’m not sure if this will be better than just going with the more expensive USB version.

I’m wondering how people are approaching this. I’m also considering going full Macgyver but then still need power supplies that can power a whole bunch of sata drives

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I know with my synology I can pull them out and replace them, but you have to do one at a time. After you replace it, it has to sync everything.

Believe it or not, racks are awesome. I have one sitting in my living room. You might be able to find good deals on some if you look into used audio equipment. Been wanting to grab another one for a bit.

Also, take a look at alibaba, they have some cheap jbods and I’ve been thinking about getting one off there.

Been thinking about going macgyver as well. Getting a 3D printer and some aluminum extrusion. You can buy the internal hot swap cages and get some pci cards and hook everything up.

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So how is that setup then? Because what I see around basically breaks down to these categories

  • A rack that can just hold disks but has no cabling, just a metal thing to screw disk into.
  • Server chassis with lots of space for drives, but needs PSU, Mainboard etc.
  • Small Jbod’s with like 4 disks connecting to a single Mini Sas

The last one seems the easiest option, but all the ones I see like that are quite small and not really cheap enough compared to a 300$ USB Jbod for 8 disks

The other two options need all kind of other stuff to be added before it will work

There’s just soo many options with that server stuff :sweat_smile:

Also I’m wondering what kind of power supply is best for powering a whole bunch of sata drives like that

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I don’t know a whole lot and there’s probably better ways to do this stuff but the rack has a 4u server I’m working on for a nas. Will have ability for 10+ drives. I guess that’s the server chassis build type you mentioned.

There’s a dell r240 which I use for random projects.

A draw and some shelves to keep the synology and WiFi. Sitting on top of the rack is the printer. There’s a switch on the back I use sometimes to connect some things.

It works out pretty well and it’s got wheels on the bottom to move it around.

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If it’s a Windows, OSX, Linux system, not NAS, you should just need to unmount the disk.

I haven’t used Windows since they tried to make it a phone/tablet OS around Windows 9 but I think there is a way to unmount safely. For OSX it’s disk utility. For Linux, umount via cli.

If you can’t do it cleanly, then on OSX or umount do a sync and be sure to check the disks when mounting them on the other machine.

For more advanced, on Linux and OSX if you want to know what processes are using a disk, you can:

lsof | grep mount-point-name

Are you on linux? I think you can hot-swap SATA drives directly off consumer grade motherboards with linux (of course that means leaving the case open and the motherboard exposed). I have some parts lying around right now - I could test this if you like.

Hot-swapping with Chia is pretty straight-forward since the final “copy from phase4 to permanent storage” step happens relatively rarely (once per plot generated!) and is easy to work around. And if you do happen to pick a bad moment, the original plot file is still preserved in its source area (typically in your NVME plotting area).

No I’m on Windows for now at least.
Ok, so I got an option to get a NetApp DS4246 24-bay Jbod including 2x power supply, 2x controller and cables to connect it to a HBA. all for 250 euro

Now I m looking for a budget HBA that will run this thing. The guy who sells it was using a LSI 9200-8e, but those are around 200-400$

Anyone got a good suggestion?