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I sometimes need to plug a disk into a disk bay. At other times, I have the very weird setup of connecting a SSD using a SATA-eSATA cable on my laptop while pulling power from a desktop.

How can I safely remove the SATA disk from the system? This Phoronix forum thread has some suggestions:

justsumdood wrote:

An(noymous)droid wrote:

What then do you do on the software side before unplugging? Is it a simple "umount /dev/sd"[drive letter]?
after unmounting the device, to "power off" (or sleep) the unit:

hdparm -Y /dev/sdX

(where X represents the device you wish to power off. for example: /dev/sdb)

this will power the drive down allowing for it's removal w/o risk of voltage surge.

Does this mean that the disk caches are properly flushed and powered off thereafter?

Another suggestion from the same thread:

chithanh wrote:

All SATA and eSATA hardware is physically able to be hotplugged (ie. not damaged if you insert/pull the plug).

How the chipset and driver handles this is another question. Some driver/chipset combinations do not properly handle hotplugging and need a warmplug command such as the following one:

echo 0 - 0 > /sys/class/scsi_host/hostX/scan

Replace X with the appropriate number for your SATA/eSATA port.

I doubt whether is the correct way to do so, but I cannot find some proof against it either.

So, what is the correct way to remove an attached disk from a system? Assume that I have already unmounted every partition on the disk and ran sync. Please point to some official documentation if possible, I could not find anything in the Linux documentation tree, nor the Linux ATA wiki.

1. Unmount any filesystems on the disk. (umount ...)


2. Deactivate any LVM groups. (vgchange -an)


3. Make sure nothing is using the disk for anything.


4. Once you've done that, it should be safe to unplug.

If you want to be extra cautious, do echo 1 > /sys/block/(whatever)/device/delete first. That'll unregister the device from the kernel, so you know nothing's using it when you unplug it. When I do that with a drive in an eSATA enclosure, I can hear the drive's heads park themselves, so the kernel apparently tells the drive to prepare for power-down.

If you're using an AHCI controller, it should cope with devices being unplugged. If you're using some other sort of SATA controller, the driver might be confused by hotplugging.

In my experience, SATA hotplugging (with AHCI) works pretty well in Linux. I've unplugged an optical drive, plugged in a hard drive, scanned it for errors, made a filesystem and copied data to it, unmounted and unplugged it, plugged in a differerent DVD drive, and burned a disc, all with the machine up and running.

Those two sections are for different things.

The first is for unplugging. The second is for plugging.

For unplugging, the OS will sync the data during the unmount operation. Thus, if the disk is unmounted (assuming you in fact do have full hardware support) you can power off the disk then unplug it without risk of data loss or corruption.

For plugging, the device should be automatically recognized. If not, you can execute that command to trigger a bus scan. Once the device is recognized you can mount it.

And let me caveat this by saying I've only ever done this sort of thing with USB drives.

what about eject /dev/sdX? On my setup, this commands umounts, syncs and powers down the drive.

I have a pair of scripts that build upon the answer by Wyzard. The first, scsi-drop, is to safely detach a single disk:

#!/bin/sh



if test -h "$1"

then

    disk=$(chase "$1")

else

    disk="$1"

fi



if test -b "$disk"

then

    echo 1 >/sys/block/$(basename "$disk")/device/delete

else

    echo "$0: not a block device: $1" >&2

    exit 1

fi

Its main benefit is that you can pass it a symlink, such as found in /dev/disk/by-id/ and it will resolve that to the real device. It does require chase to be installed; you might be able to get the same result using readlink -e.

The second script, scsi-rescan, is used after hotplugging a new device:

#!/bin/bash



exec tee /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/scan <<<'- - -' >/dev/null

This makes all adapters re-scan for devices. It was the only way I managed to get the new capacity and partition table to be read.

actually sata drives automatically parks the head when power is lost from what i know so pulling the drive while still spinning should not result in issues however spinning disks are prone to dings while spinning. you can hear this when you have flaky power or solar flares :P

the most damage is usually from non flushed cache and uncommitted writes in buffers etc ... this is why you MUST unmount a drive before removing it . the scsi command is just good measures to the same end.