Using Hot Swap Bay in Corsair Air 540

Hi Dax......Adding a drive through the hotswap bay is the same as the convential since hotswap is just prewired with SATA and the psu power cable.

They just slide in like you said but some need a little extra push to seat properly.

Last I looked the Green was slow and not recommended for gaming but just cheaper storage like photos, etc.   The Blue is the fastest with its single platter but only 2 year warranty and use to be limited in size because of the single platter.     The Black is the most reliable and has the longest warranty at 5 years.   

DS should have hooked the backplanes up during the building.

Have fun.

Edited by bprat22 - 11 May 2017 at 12:09am

Hmmm - OK so I was psyched as a 4 TB WD Black hard drive went on sale at New Egg (yay for timing) which I snapped up immediately. I've plugged this into the hot swap bay. It sounds like it's powered up as I can hear the platter spinning (I think anyway). However, I see no sign of this hard drive. Is there some other step I need to take? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
    

It doesn't show in Disk Management. I've tried both bays now. If they didn't hook these up, I'm going to be a bit peeved to be honest. Unless they are both dead, I'm not sure what's going on to be honest...I can't really tell about the cabling as the first bay is directly in back of the power supply and the other has all the wires covering it on the 'closed' side of the Air 540...I am fairly certain that I hear it 'whirr' though...

Edited by Dax Doomslayer - 17 May 2017 at 8:24am

Another thought....try hard rebooting the rig after mounting the hdd in the hot swap bay.  Or, slide it in while there's power on.  Could be a finicky Bios but who knows.

Hey Dax.    I looked up the 540 yesterday just to brush up and the Hot Swap  bays come with the wires already hardwired into the back.   There should be a small bundle of wires, probably 2 cables, the power and the kinda flat SATA , coming up from the backplane.   But I see your point. With the psu and the other wires all sharing space it could get messy untieing the bundles.

There is a possibility that a Bios tweak is needed for it to recognize the HotSwap, like making sure AHCI is selected for the controller its plugged into.   Most mobo have 2 SATA controllers, Intel and Maxwell as an example,  and sometimes changing which one is used can help.   But, you need to know which one.

DS, hopefully, has a quick Bios fix for this.

 

Always a pleasure.

I'm dying to found out what it is.  I hate unresolved issues. 

Hey bprat, where did you see that information about the hot swap bays being pre-wired out of curiosity?

Ahhh - thanks for that. So here's what happened. I did contact tech support for DS. Once I got them on the phone, they sort of kind of tried to help - lol. The phone connection was terrible. I was on a landline and the tech's phone seemed to cut in and out pretty frequently where I couldn't hear most of the sentences he was saying. Tried to call back and the same thing - I'm not sure what was going on there. They did try to direct me to check to see if the cables were hooked up but the tech had indicated that I needed to start pulling things out (i.e. video cards etc) which to be honest I didn't want to start 'monkeying around' with if I could only understand every 5th and 6th word. In addition, it didn't seem as if he was overly familiar with the case (thus my question to you previously as to where you found that information about the pre-wired). So, I bit the bullet and went to the local shop near me. I purchased a WD Black 4 TB SATA hard drive.   Come to find out, the hot swap bays are perfectly fine according to the place I brought it. The issue is that the 4 TB Hard Drive is too big and isn't in the bios. I can't go higher than 2 TB. So now I have a 4 TB hard drive that I can't use (I don't want to mess with flashing bios etc even if there is an update to the bios - if it ain't broke, don't fix it) and now need to buy a 2 TB - lol. So that's where I ended up with this (and somewhat frustrated)!! I appreciate the time you took to try to help.

Actually they did confirm the 4 TB drive did work. They also tried to partition it into 2 TB per partition and that didn't work either. I'm not sure what to do with the thing. Maybe give it to one of my nephews - lol...

Mehh - it's all good I guess. It is what it is. I guess the good news is, is that NewEgg is running a special promo on WD Black 2 TB drives today and tomorrow so I'm getting a decent price on it at least - lol.

Thanks hoserator!! It looks like it may be delivered tomorrow. Let's hope it works!!

Nice.

Not to beat it to death, but I still think that 4tb drive should be usable. If you feel like checking it and I understand the will to move on, Wstern Digital gives you free access to Acronis True Image software for cloning, formatting, etc.   I have it for my backup WD drive.     I'm just wondering, and don't know for sure, if Acronis will see and format your 4tb drive.

Maybe it won't help since it doesn't even show, but maybe worth a look.

Enjoy the new drive and good to know the hot swaps work.

I know this is an old post so it may fall on deaf ears, but I have this rig as well, got it about 7 years ago. I just recently picked up a 1TB HDD that I wanted to use as a seperate storage from my SSD which runs my OS and game files. I inserted to the slot, confirmed SATA cables and Power cables were connected but drive wouldnt show up in Disc Management or BIOS ( thinking i needed to format there first) I have a MSI z370 A Pro MOBO. read through the comments to see if there was anything I havent tried, not sure if yall think the cables might have gone bad. however I dont think i hear the drive spinning so there may be an issue with power getting to it somehow

Hot swap slots can be very finicky.   Sometimes it’s necessary to jiggle and push the hard drive into the slot. Hitting it a little harder than normal has been needed for drives to seat.   Make sure the power and SATA are connected both at the back of slot and the other ends, power from psu and SATA plugged into the right motherboard slot.

You can double check the drive itself by connecting it outside the Hotswsp slot….power plug and SATA directly to the drive. If no power or showing in Device Manager then could be a bad drive.   

Try different SATA connections on the motherboard.   If you have a multimeter check the power plug has juice. Try a different power adapter from the harness.

Good luck.

The only time I can usually hear a spinning hard drive is when it’s failing.    I guess getting close enough to it might work if it’s spinning.

Perfectly safe to power down all you want.   If your old HD has an OS on it then no problem.   The Pc already knows which drive to use for booting and will ignore a different drive and any OS on it, unless you unplug the original drive and boot with the new.

I have plugged in to SATA ports while the pc was live, no problems, but wouldn’t recommend it.    Can’t remember if I had to reboot anyways.

Interesting!