I rotate backup drives. With 2.4 kernels, I could hotswap PATA (40 pin Parallel ATA IDE) drives directly, using hdparm to tristate the bus. 2.6 doesn't permit this, so I use USB2 hot swap cages instead (see http://wiki.dirvish.org/index.cgi?USB2Drives ). I have been experimenting with SATA hot swap. I will be keeping my PATA drives for the next few years, but I can use a SATA to PATA IDE bridge board (JMicron JM20330 chipset, about $20) to connect the PATA drive to a SATA cable to a SATA board. This works at the same speed as direct connect PATA, 30MB/s, much faster than USB2 at 10 to 20MB/s. I've been running a "mount-write-read-erase-unmount" loop, 100GB at a time, about 1 hour per cycle, for the last 3 days with no lockups. Some USB2 bridge chipsets lock up after 5-50GB of transfer. I am confident enough to try making backups through the SATA path. Many different SATA-PATA bridge boards are available. Perhaps some of you would like to try some of the other possibilities. With all the different options, I expect some will fail, either immediately or after a few hours, but it would help to learn what works. If this does work, I may be ditching a bunch of USB2 hardware. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [log in to unmask] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs