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All electrical and mechanical connections associated with hot-swapping must be designed so that neither the equipment nor the user can be harmed while hot-swapping. Machines that support hot swapping need to be able to modify their operation for the changed configuration, either automatically on detecting the change, or by user intervention.
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Important cards such as disk controllers or host adapters may be designed with redundant paths in order for these to be replaceable in case of failure without necessitating interruption of associated computer system operation. A machine may have dual power supplies, each adequate to power the machine a faulty one may be hot-swapped. Hot swapping may be used to add or remove peripherals or components, to allow a device to synchronize data with a computer, and to replace faulty modules without interrupting equipment operation. It may simply be for convenience of avoiding the delay and nuisance of shutting down and then restarting complex equipment or because it is essential for equipment, such as a server, to be continuously active. Hot swapping is used whenever it is desirable to change the configuration or repair a working system without interrupting its operation. Many cameras and camcorders feature an internal memory to allow capturing when no memory card is inserted. Batteries can be cycled through by recharging reserve batteries externally while unused. Most smartphones and tablets with tray-loading holders can interchange SIM cards without powering down the system.ĭedicated digital cameras and camcorders usually have readily accessible memory card and battery compartments for quick changing with only minimal interruption of operation.
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However, it is common for mid to high-end servers and mainframes to feature hot-swappable capability for hardware components, such as CPU, memory, PCIe, SATA and SAS drives.Īn example of hot swapping is the express ability to pull a Universal Serial Bus (USB) peripheral device, such as a thumb drive, external Hard Disk Drive (HDD), mouse, keyboard, or printer out of a computer's USB slot or peripheral hub without ejecting it first. Most desktop computer hardware, such as CPUs and memory, are only cold-pluggable. Components which have such functionality are said to be hot-swappable or hot-pluggable likewise, components which do not are cold-swappable or cold-pluggable. Hot swapping is the replacement or addition of components to a computer system without stopping, shutting down, or rebooting the system hot plugging describes the addition of components only. Hot-swapping a hard drive in a storage server
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