Have you tried to ask support of Silicon Images on how to prepare the device to hot-unplug? AFAIK they write in datasheet that their devices support hot-unplug, so probably they now how to do this. We need any information on how to stop such devices, so I'm interesting about this.
It's not hot-swappable (or shutdown-able) yet.
I've been working with one of the tech's at DAT Optic for quite some time now. He often tells me that 'the engineer said to try this', so I know it's not just a helpdesk tech answering emails.
Now that I have a good test environment, I will hopefully be able to help them to help us figure this out. They sold me the equipment below and work with Silicon Image (Silicon Image sent me to Dat Optic when i tried to get support from them).
Here is the card (SiI3124):
http://www.datoptic.com/cgi-bin/web.cgi ... detail=yes
Here is the enclosure:
http://www.datoptic.com/cgi-bin/web.cgi ... detail=yes
Here is the chip that is in the enclosure:
http://www.sci-worx.com/products/product.aspx?id=26
They have had me try to disable the SATA device, the RAID card, and I am waiting on their reply from my latest discoveries.
Yes, we can do cache flushing, but I'm not sure that it helps to solve the problem. The drive will not be spun down, so it may cause problems
This was just an idea that I thought I'd like to try. I've read that in most cases, using SATA disables this feature by default and won't let you enable it. In my case, it is just the opposite. DAT Optic also said that uninstalling the disk drive, will make the system check and make sure all the caches are written. They said that it will insure that the RAID data is not in the buffer when the system is shut down and there won't be any corrupted data. I still get the "RAID group was not shutdown properly" and "restore redundancy" (rebuilds the array) entries in the event log. I've tried uninstalling and disabling the disk drive and no luck.
I'll update you with their reply (sometimes they take their time). And please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks,
Matt[/url]