Removable HDDs?

[Quinn]

I just switched to use a DFI board last week, so I'm a DFI rookie for sure. I have noticed one thing that appears strange to me. All my 4 SATA HDDs appear on the "Safely Remove Hardware" tray icon when clicked. I've never had any other mobo which has offerred regular HDDs in this manner. Its typically been USB attached devices and such that are obviously removable/portable. Is this normal for DFI boards? Or is this the behaviour of the nVidia IDE drivers? If it is the IDE driver that is causing this, is it safe to uninstall it and just MS IDE drivers in XP?

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks.

[lowboy]

Just part of nv drivers is normal just hide in tray.

[heptadragon]

Quinn,

 

AFAIK most SATA hard drives are capable of being hotplugged (or hot-un-plugged as the case may be). I know the SiI3114 chip has this capability, and I would imagine that the NVIDIA SATA controller has it as well (but I haven't checked). To keep them from showing up, you have a couple of different options. You can use the generic MS driver (which prevents them from being switched to "safe-removal" mode) and they will no longer show up in that dialog. If you are using the NVIDIA driver you can simply switch them to "performance" mode. Open your Device Manager and open up the properties page for each drive individually. Under the Policies tab you'll find two options, "optimize for safe removal" and "optimize for performance". If you pick the performance option the drives should no longer show up in your "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog. You might also want to enable write caching if you want to boost performance a little bit, it's your call though.

 

Hope this helps.

 

P.S. The MS driver should work just fine if you don't want to use the NVIDIA IDE driver, I've read that some people have stability issues when using it.

[Guest SuppA-SnipA]

all is good, hide in tray, sata- hotswap

[Jachyra007]

I found a registry tweak that turns off the SATA remove hardware option in the task bar, for those who might accidently remove a C: instead of another USB component -

 

1. Click Start menu > Run > type regedit and then press ENTER;

2. Navigate to the following key:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesnvata

 

3. Create a new DWORD value called "DisableRemovable" (without quotes) and set to "1";

4. Close Regedit and restart Windows.

 

I guess it has something to installing the 'Optimized IDE Nvidia controller', that performs better than the standard Wondows one, but comes with this little issue.

 

On my computer - XP Pro SP2 it was 'nvatabus', but it still worked

[Quinn]

I've not been thrilled with having all my SATA drives appear as removable. I understand that hotpluggability is part of the spec, but I like protection from doing stupid things. So I decided to give this a try .... and it works.

 

The only oddity I've found with it, is now at times, usually at boot and right after "Removing" a USB drive, MBM5 reports 0 degress on SATA drives for a few samples. Afterwards MBM5 returns to reporting drive temps correctly.

 

For those who might want to try this, I've created a .REG file that will apply this registry tweak easily. Simply cut n paste the following lines (between "file starts:" and "file ends:") into an appropriately named file, something like Disable-nVidia-SATA-Remove.reg. Remember to use the .reg extension. After saving the newly created file, simply invoke it, either from the command line or from an explorer window.

 

file starts: ***********************************

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesnvatabus]

"DisableRemovable"=dword:1

file ends: ************************************

[heptadragon]

It works on XP Pro x64 as well, you just need to place the DWORD value in "HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesnvata64".

[Quinn]

Quinn,

 

If you are using the NVIDIA driver you can simply switch them to "performance" mode. Open your Device Manager and open up the properties page for each drive individually. Under the Policies tab you'll find two options, "optimize for safe removal" and "optimize for performance". If you pick the performance option the drives should no longer show up in your "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog. You might also want to enable write caching if you want to boost performance a little bit, it's your call though.

 

I've found that by default my drives are set to "performance" mode. However, even set this way, they still appear in the "Removal" list.

 

I ended up trying the registry tweak found here: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=59042.