Remove Hard Drive Without Shutting Down

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Level 3

861 points

Remove Hard Drive Without Shutting Down

I have four SATA hard drives in my MacPro: a new 1TB primary boot drive, 1TB scratch disk, 1TB time machine drive, and the old 250GB boot drive which I no longer use. I want to remove the old 250GB drive, which is in drive bay 4, and install it on another MacPro.

My question is: can I use Disk Utility to unmount the old 250GB drive in bay 4, open up my MacPro (being careful to remove any static discharge on my hands) remove the drive, close up the MacPro all while it's still *powered on?*

Mac Pro (2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon), Mac OS X (10.6.4), 10GB RAM Apple 24" LED Cinema Display

Posted on Aug 12, 2010 9:19 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Aug 12, 2010 9:27 AM in response to Marc Dahmen

They are not hot-swap, and opening the case exposes FBDIMMs to sudden change in air temperature, for which Apple recommends waiting 10 minutes after shutdown to allow gradual cooling before opening.

There are SATA controllers and cases that do offer nice hot swap drive cases.

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Answer 2

Marc Dahmen Author

Level 3

861 points

Aug 12, 2010 9:33 AM in response to Marc Dahmen

Thank you for the prompt reply and answer. The words "hot swap" escaped me at the time of my post.

I will wait until the process I'm doing finishes, then shut down and remove the drive.

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