The programs toolstar®testLX, toolstar®shredderLX, toolstar®testWIN and toolstar®shredderWIN supports dynamic detection of data carriers for testing and erasure. This gives you the opportunity to remove disks that have already been tested and add new ones while the process is running, without having to exit the program or restart the entire system. This is very useful if you delete, for example, 4 disks. Of these, 3 are 120GB NVMe data carriers and 1 data carrier is a classic HDD with 4 TB. Thanks to hotplugging, you are no longer tied to the slowest disk and can delete additional disks on the other 3 ports while the HDD continues to run on port 4.
Setup in the program
Disk hotplugging is only supported within an automation script. Follow the steps below to activate the feature:
- Open an automation script
- From the tests on the right, select one of the hard drive tests and edit it or add a new test.
- This opens the editing mask in the program. Go to the “Drive Selection” item on the left.
- Here you can set the settings for hotplugging. To do this, simply select “Wait for drives connected during operation and automatically start the tests on them”.
- Hotplugging is now active. This can be seen in the dialog in the top left corner during execution.
How hotplugging works
If hotplugging is enabled, the program will wait at this point and check whether new hard drives are added. The connection doesn't matter. This means that the process will only end completely when you no longer connect any data storage devices and uncheck the box next to “Wait for devices plugged in during operation and start tests on them”. The current process is completely terminated and then the current disk test or the entire script ends (depending on the setting in the general options or per test).
Hotplugging events are recorded at the bottom of the status log. It can take a few seconds until a connected data storage device appears in the program. First, the data carrier is recognized, read, checked and then integrated into the process. Depending on the speed of the controller and the data carrier, this can happen very quickly or take a few seconds. A delay between detection of the connection and integration into the process is also possible.
Tips and tricks
- Dynamic / semi-automatic termination of hotplugging during operation
If you have reached the last round of data carriers, you can uncheck the Wait for data carrier box at the top left. This will terminate the current process but will no longer wait and the system will carry out all further actions in “When Finished”. - Enter your own field values per data carrier
If you use the individual fields per data carrier, you can of course also use these for hotplugging. - Set up a erasure server with connection naming
You can find suitable instructions at here. Basically, certain connections can be given names such as Bay 1, Slot 2 or Connection 1 at the back right. This information is displayed during the process and enables targeted removal of the data carriers.
Required hardware
Basically no special hardware is required. Any device with a hotpluggable controller (USB, ATA, NVMe, SAS, etc.) is supported. This should be pretty much every device these days. The hotplugging feature may need to be activated in the controller's BIOS/EFI settings or, for RAID controllers, via the RAID BIOS or RAID CLI.
