Couple of Techy Questions

CS can give you a refund. They can also tweak your delivery options on their website (same as you could do).

What they can't do is change their delivery methods, so "complaining about their delivery method" to CS won't work.

Try emailing the UK managing director.

People on this NG are being remarkably polite to you, but you can bet they're sniggering quietly.

Are you suggesting I should be concerned?

Thank you for your kind advice.

Start by checking the BIOS, for the "Hot Swap" setting in the BIOS SATA port section. This setting can be exposed on enthusiast desktop motherboard BIOS.

It has to be turned on in the BIOS, for Southbridge/PCH SATA ports to have Hot Swap support. Various other means of providing SATA ports, it's already turned on.

Hot Swap support means, that in the middle of an OS session while you are sipping your coffee, if a running SATA drive suddenly has the seven pin data connector make contact with the seven contact motherboard connector, the SATA link trains up, and the motherboard "mounts" the physical layer, scans the drive, and mounts all the file systems on partitions.

If the detection is not enabled, touching the contacts together does nothing at all.

In the reverse direction, removal, there are safe and safer ways to do that.

1) Use an application level command, that takes a drive offline, and not only does the drive go offline, it parks the heads and turns off the motor. Drives have various sleep states. Not all drives support the sleep states. Some of the drives work very well. Good luck figuring this part out. I have some USB external drives (not what we are talking about), which successfully put the drive "offline" when you issue a Safely Remove.

Getting this to happen for a SATA drive, it *could* happen, because with Hot Swap turned on, the "Safely Remove" menu now has your Hot Swap drive in the menu, ready for a kick in the nuts. But if you use the Safely Remove, the minimum it does is flush the files. The drive could still be spinning, and is not necessarily in the parked state. The reason this is unpredictable, is because drives do not have consistent support states. Some, accept no "hints" at all about parking -- the drives are brain dead. But your files are safe.

2) The next phase, is power removal. Remove power from the drive. The SATA data cable is AC coupled, and can be disconnected any time. With the power off, in a "controlled state" such as the drive had in (1), the drive does not "count one emergency power fail" in its SMART table. If the drive is not spinning, it is pretty hard for a drive to log "that the power just went off".

3) The third step, is the physical ejection operation. The ejection lever, at a minimum, eases the drive out of its backplane connection. If the drive is completely disabled as in (2), this step causes no electrical challenges whatsoever. There is no arcing, there is no reason for MOV to conduct and suppress an arc.

Well, as it turns out, the hard drive *was* designed, to just be ripped out of the equipment by a cretin. There are two MOV near the +5V and +12V input power connector, which suppress hot removal arcing and overvoltage. The drive can start emergency powerdown, when you yank it out. As long as you have not violated the G-rating of a running spinning disk, then the heads will retract to the landing ramp, using energy extracted from the rotating platter and motor-turned-generator. Before retraction, the contents of the drive DRAM cache, are written to the platter.

In the case of large capacity hard drives with 512MB DRAM cache onboard (pretty unusual), the emergency power fail is implemented by dumping DRAM, to a special NAND flash on the controller board. They do this, since there isn't sufficient time to write out

512MB of material before the power is gone. the drives only resort to writing out to the NAND, on an emergency power fail. On normal shutdown sequences, the NAND is not used, and all the files are flushed from cache to the platter, in the normal way.

By understanding some of the properties of hot swap drives, you can make the life of your drive, as simple as you would like :-)

The worst case, is when a drive flubs the landing, the voice coil doesn't have the energy to get the heads onto the plastic ramp... and the heads have now landed right on the platter. Ordinary drives do not have laser-patterned landing areas for heads. The heads could *stick* to the platter, if they land the wrong way. (This hardly ever happens.) We press the front button on PCs in the middle of Windows Update, all the time, so we have been "testing for flubs" on a regular basis :-)

Someone in another group, turned off the power to his PC, when it said on the screen "Do NOT turn off the power". Guess what happened :-/ I understand he reinstalled Windows 10 yesterday.

If you are going to be adventurous, be prepared. The equipment is prepared for adventure. But, you can do your part to help.

If I thought all the equipment I owned, was fully compliant and well behaved (parking support), I would not mind using this feature.

Paul