ever seen something advertised as hot swap and not been sure what that means i
mean at first i thought it was an easy way of identifying really bad plastic
surgeons you know swap your hot for something else that ah never mind that
joke fell flatter than a botched breast reduction
anyway what hot swappable or hot pluggable means in the context of
technology specifically electronics is that a particular component is designed
to be disconnected and even reconnected without powering down the rest of the
system okay Linus so why would we want to do that well imagine for a second a
world where you had to power down your cellular telephone every time you wanted
to plug in your headphones and you know jam out to some tunes
the kids would say and then upon completion of the jam out session turn
your phone back off take the headphones out and then power it back on i mean
it's ridiculous right so that's what it's for quickly changing out peripheral
devices like keyboards mice and game controllers usb drives as long as you do
it safely displays and network cables on personal computers for a much more
convenient user experience or if you think much bigger than that it's also
important to achieve the reliability that allows the servers that host your
favorite websites and online services to provide nearly perfect uptime in an
enterprise setting hot swap can be used on some pretty unexpected stuff dead or
working hard drives can be pulled out of redundant arrays and replaced or
upgraded on the fly with no data loss and in the case of redundant power
supplies even a power supply for a server can be swapped out without ever
shutting it down but not everything can be hot swapped and there are many things
an interface designer needs to consider to make hot swapping safe mechanical
interfaces need to protect the user from mashing his or her fingers or getting
zapped and similarly the electrical design of the interface and the software
needs to be resilient enough to handle being suddenly disconnected in the
middle of operation some things aren't designed to work for hot swap but might
actually work like sim cards for cell phones and older ps2 mice but others
must never be hot swaps because it would result in an instant software error
causing the system to shut down and possibly hardware failure examples of
these sorts of things include system memory graphics cards and cpus but
this might not always even be the case technology is always changing and some
of the early concepts for the project are a phone for example suggest that we
might even see components like batteries become hot-swappable
also who knows i sure don't
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