eSATA and Linux w/ hotplug

        Has anyone used eSATA with Linux in a hotplug fashion? It's easy
enough to have eSATA on and use an HD, but if I want to remove or add
the HD, suddenly the system falls flat. Unlike usb-storage, adding or
removing a drive doesn't cause a dynamic rescan of the bus or a registry
with the SCSI-disk layer. rmmod and modprobe of ahci (which is the
driver responsible for eSATA on my system) is a hack at best (at worst,
your internal SATA disks are on the same chip as the eSATA ports!). The
kernel tends to panic or become unstable after using such a method.
        Worse, the rescan scsi bus (a script I used with firewire iPods and
Linux) no longer works in 2.6.x. I can use USB, but USB 2.0 (despite
its lofty 480Mbps claims) tops-out due to protocol overhead at 0.4x to
0.5x of what my eSATA drives are capable of.

        I've been looking around online to no-avail. I don't want to sit down
and go through the code until after I figure out the EEpro 1000/SMP
lockup bug in 32-bit anyway :p
Received on Sun Aug 19 16:17:20 2007