Hot swapping, What is it?
Hot swapping is either adding or removing different components to a computer system without stopping, shutting down, or rebooting the system. Certain drives and other components with such functionality are said to be hot-swappable or hot-pluggable. The term “hot plugging” describes the addition of components. Components that can be swapped vary from PCIe, CPU, memory, SAS and SATA drives. The most common hot swappable devices are used via Universal Serial Bus or USB these devices can be flash drives, keyboard, mice, and more.
Does my system have hot-swappable or hot-pluggable functionality? The outside of the USB drives, the majority of personal PCs do not have this functionality. However, it is more common for mid to high end servers to have this capability.
Hot-swapping can be used to adjust a systems configuration without interrupting its current operation. This operation can be carried out to avoid having to shutdown the entire system.
We have a number of different drives that are hot-swappable however here are a couple honorable mentions: