Thursday 23 August 2012

Is it safe to move spanned drives between SATA ports?

With Windows 7 Home 64-bit this worked flawlessly and entirely automatically for me.

I tried this with a spanned volume of 9TB (3x2TB + 1x3TB) where by mistake I had connected the 3TB drive to a JMicron 363 SATA-port and the rest were connected to the integrated nVidia nvraid ports. The use of the JMicron port worked reasonably fine in IDE-mode, but when I tried to configure it in AHCI-mode it acted randomly giving varying write speeds between 18MB/s to 67MB/s whereas the same drive now connected to the nForce SATA-port clocks in a steady 80MB/s both read and write. (SATA-300).

Procedure:
1. Update all SATA controller drivers to the newest version just in case. My Computer -> Manage -> Device Manager -> Storage Devices -> <controller> -> Update Driver -> Update Automatically
2. Reboot computer to verify that the drivers work properly.
3. Shutdown computer, switch power supply off or unplug from wall before detaching the SATA cables
4. Move SATA cable to desired new SATA-port on the motherboard/SATA-controller card.
5. Replug the power supply. Start computer.
6. Login to Windows normally, wait for automatic device driver installation to finish and when prompted, reboot. (Device driver association is per port, but clearly volume information is writen on each disk in the spanning group and is not dependent on SATA-port numbers)
7. After reboot your are done. Have Fun!