i remember seeing in the bio settings of
this motherboard this very expensive motherboard an option for pci express
hot swap which i have never personally tried
before but what it sounds like is just
putting pci express cards in and taking them off while this system is running
is that going to work wow i actually super don't know so let's
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so uh there's lots of things in a computer that are hot swappable and that
we hot swap every day so usb for example even though you would safely remove the
device theoretically with the you know little prompt in the bottom corner
anytime you are taking something out or putting something in
without powering off first it is technically hot swap and some standards
that don't support hot swap like ps2 keyboards for
example you can still for the most part hot swap
them without any ill effects with all of that said there are components out there
that either cannot be hot swapped or
have to be specifically designed for hot
swap in order to function with it even components like
cpus and memory can
actually be hot swap but that's more of a server level feature where the system
itself and usually some kind of a of a daughter board that that slides in or
whatever else has to be designed for it because you can't just you can't just
cut power to uh to a computer component and expect everything to operate
normally now as for pci express
i confess i haven't done a ton of research coming
into this so it's possible that the device itself
also needs to be designed for hot swap
but then it's possible that it doesn't i don't know where we're
going to find out today for those of you wondering the the titan
x here i will not be hot swapping that that's
just here so that we have a display output i think it's time for us to go
find some victims so this is our selection of random pci
express cards that are of sort of dubious value
uh these actually got for free in scrapyard wars you know what let's start
with these okay so uh
oh yeah before we do this i should
probably enable hot swap
ah there it is
no idea what any of these settings do
sure looks good to me
i wonder what's better black slots or
gray slots i'm gonna try a gray slot
oh this feels so wrong
okay
nothing catastrophic appears to have happened
okay it's not showing up
let's try a restart stop code driver power state failure
go ahead and cut okay so one of three things happened here either you have to actually power
off for it to be detected we're gonna try that first
or we killed it or
it was dead already which is quite possible this has been sitting on a
shelf for literally years either way it can go over there now
all right now this
i am at least 40 percent sure works
okay whoa now hold on a minute
whoa hold on a minute i think that's more usb than we had
before okay don't cut this clip because no one's
gonna believe me if we cut this clip
maybe i was wrong go ahead and cut so after powering down
and turning it back on it's working
did it not show up because the system had never seen this
device before
oh oh oh ouch oh uncorrectable error ouch go ahead and
cut we're gonna disable it then
we're gonna pull it
we hot unplugged something
am i gonna get away with a hardware changes scan
i'm starting to wonder if these are just bugged on this computer
look it's still in there but i know for a fact
see i can prove that the hardware is not in there
let's just go for it
oh damn it go ahead and cut
i'm gonna grab a different boot drive go ahead
all right let's try a more fresh Windows
enable oh there it goes
go ahead and cut maybe the black slots are bad luck
you let me down buddy go ahead and cut
maybe we just need to try something that's not a storage device how about
this network card
go ahead and cut so what we think we know so far is that we haven't actually
killed any of the hardware we've been experimenting with i did find a couple potential
sacrificial cards here so this is like a 5450
and then this is that titan that we brutally
savaged
so the AMD card seems to have given zero f's
just like the network card um go ahead and cut this is like an og
titan it's not it's not very high end anymore neither of them are showing up
let's try a restart here oh my god is that Windows up i hate it
go ahead and cut okay so we're having problems booting at all go ahead and cut good cut go ahead
and cut holy sh no oh my what the
don't prompt again no
so the AMD card is showing up now
i think what we have to do is try some more modern hardware
a 750 series SSD and let's try a more modern graphics
card a 1050 ti
oh fans turned on
that one's definitely getting power
come on really
has to be a driver thing
so let's see if at least after just a soft reset
they show up because that will tell us if maybe
Windows is the issue wait what
the graphics card's not showing up
let's pull the SSD
off
let's fire up Windows server go ahead and cut
okay okay bye uh so i'm an idiot um
you don't have to enable this i didn't even read it this just says you have to
enable this if your os does not support
pci express hot plug ahead and cut
so let's go straight for gold
no here goes the usb drive nope network
can Linux handle it better
it showed up and then it crashed
while we were trying Linux i was preparing a server
2016 installation oh shut up
best case scenario so we have the presence of mind to disable it before we
pull it
maybe there's some options or something go ahead and cut
okay so we've reached the point in this project where it's time to talk to tech
support um
and i did find a really interesting article so this is an Intel white paper
about their data center ssds but as you
guys might have noticed when we were booted into ubuntu
this SSD shows up as one of their data center ssds they're actually based on a
very very similar platform in fact i believe they use the same pcb even so i
was really hoping that this would behave similarly and they do support hot swap
PCIe including surprise hot add or hot remove
but native os hot plug no
so we need to have that off
okay BIOS hot plug support is only for if it
doesn't support it natively which this says Windows does
and we have to ensure that surprise hot plug registers are set correctly
so i'm gonna try this
while i wait for ASUS to get back to me go ahead and cut
oh no
go away
all right well i guess if it never detects it it can never
crash go ahead and cut i think i've been going about this all
wrong i saw
pci express hot plug in the BIOS
and i went yeah
heck yeah these slots
but what if what if they actually mean
pci express storage over u.2
so this board is actually really unique come have a look at this in that it has
four this is part of what it's using all those PCIe lanes on the CPU for it has
four u.2 connectors so these
are technically 4x PCIe slots
effectively you can actually just run a cable off of them
and plug them into a 16x slot
what they're intended for though are NVMe drives like this one this is the
same drive as this it's just that instead of this it's got this
so the board might only be set up for that
on these lanes i mean it's less dramatic looking but
this is still potentially really cool which means
go ahead and cut so i am not defeated
our wonderful contacted ASUS gary
has actually worked over the weekend it
turns out the features there on the board
and it's exposed in the BIOS it's not enabled
so they have provided me with a beta BIOS that should enable it
i actually wasn't that far off the board is only
specifically designed to support this hot plug functionality
on the u.2 ports so theoretically when i flash this BIOS
it will enable or unlock that functionality
close up
update time this is weird it dropped me right into
the BIOS which means i don't know what's going on
even a SATA drive isn't showing up as bootable in here so like
there it is can't boot to it
it's not even beta BIOS it's like alpha BIOS
okay you can cut i sent ASUS a complaining thing about
not being able to boot and i got back
did you rtfm they sent me instructions for a bunch of
bio stuff to reconfigure in order to enable it
we're gonna do that i mean i thought it was just a BIOS update
okay so there is some crazy stuff in
here i'm supposed to go to socket 1 ports 1a to 1d
and here is where i am
enabling hot plug and surprise hot plug
for my u.2 ports
okay this is great news
reading the manual
i want to see this work
that's interesting go ahead and cut okay this is the raid
driver we need
there it is okay where's my drive
there it is yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever okay
here it is
there it is
but off camera
i had another idea
so there's hot plug options in the BIOS for
other pci express uh slots on this board but ASUS has
specifically told me that there's like a finished system that uses this board as
a base that has a special backplane that enables the pci express slots themselves
to be hot pluggable but that the standalone board doesn't do it so given
that following their instructions so far has been my best bet i'm going to take
their word for it but i have something special
this is a u.2 to pci express adapter
so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take what is effectively
again a pci express slot
and i want to hot plug it
i don't know if this is going to work
oh no dice why don't we try this one
okay now oh
you know what no how far has listening to manufacturer
instructions ever gotten anyone so
we're going to change not just ports 1a to 1d
we're going to change all of the ports
to surprise hot plug and hot plug
and we are just going to yolo it and see what happens
one last hurrah
so something i don't know is if turning on hot plug on the slots could have some
kind of adverse effect on some other functionality
so first things first this is my best bet for hot pluggable
just sanity check i want to try off the u.2 again
see it's powered though see this is what
this is what's whoa
it's it's on
it works oh it really works check it out check it
out activity led it's fast even writing
crazy now i want to push my luck
oh
it handled it gracefully the craziest thing is i didn't even have
to like refresh device manager it was just like it was like plugging in a usb
device so now we're gonna try the network card
usb card maybe
do you see that right there
no okay hold on hold on
usb stick check this out
no it's working
that's that usb drive
now what we need to see is no blue screen
it's gone no blue screen
hot plug PCIe okay
show me that drive activity
maybe it just
oh that is crazy now maybe it's slot specific
i want to see this server network card work
i'm like shaking which is not good i mean that's the
most dangerous part of this apparently it's like
screwing up and like touching metal on some contacts here something
total madness there it is there it is
i want to see it work though
we are on the internet on a hot plugged
okay
do we keep pushing the boundaries brandon do you want to see a video card
who do we punish NVIDIA or AMD
NVIDIA what they ever do to you all right here we go
okay fans are on i can't even believe this
no way
holy sh
do you think it's gonna let me just like install a game or install the driver and
like run a game like
is this as crazy as i think it is we're just plugging and unplugging cards from
a motherboard willy-nilly it's on
we gotta show that there's no there's no tricks here
like look this bench not plugged in
this is nothing nothing nothing here
this nothing nothing
unbelievable this device is working properly
i mean is basically everything going to work
here the avermedia tv tuner card
let's go back to the very first thing we tried
i want to see this system compatibility checking can you imagine that just pop a
graphics card in your system and install the driver and go
holy crap it worked
you saw it here first my friends
hot swapping pci express cards
in a powered system because you're just a mega baller like
that and you don't play by the rules
wow
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