OK, since the lazyweb totally owned in helping me locate a killer portable media device, I can use your help once again.

I have Googled and Googled until my eyes have exploded, and I have yet to find the answer I am looking for.

The question….Can you hot swap, not warm swap, SATA drives in Linux without having them a) setup in RAID, and b) not using a hardware RAID controller card? Someone told me that you can and the kernel works out of the box that way. Well, whoever told me was wrong. I have tried it in Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and SUSE. No go, the kernel panics and blows up and I have to call the Chicago Fire Department 🙂

Warm swapping works just fine, where I unmount the drive, pull the drive, put in a new drive, configure drive, and then mount the drive. That works, but when a drive fails that isn’t on a RAID controller, or is on one, and isn’t configured with RAID, I want to a) know about it, and b) pull it out without unmounting and what not first.

So, I know there are some of you wizards out there that can help me, so please, any information you may have or questions, please comment or feel free to email me directly (nixternal kubuntu org). Thanks!