Hot Swap as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
725 words · ~3 min read
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ever seen something advertised as hot swap and not been sure what that means i
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mean at first i thought it was an easy way of identifying really bad plastic
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surgeons you know swap your hot for something else that ah never mind that
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joke fell flatter than a botched breast reduction
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anyway what hot swappable or hot pluggable means in the context of
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technology specifically electronics is that a particular component is designed
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to be disconnected and even reconnected without powering down the rest of the
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system okay Linus so why would we want to do that well imagine for a second a
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world where you had to power down your cellular telephone every time you wanted
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to plug in your headphones and you know jam out to some tunes
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the kids would say and then upon completion of the jam out session turn
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your phone back off take the headphones out and then power it back on i mean
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it's ridiculous right so that's what it's for quickly changing out peripheral
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devices like keyboards mice and game controllers usb drives as long as you do
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it safely displays and network cables on personal computers for a much more
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convenient user experience or if you think much bigger than that it's also
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important to achieve the reliability that allows the servers that host your
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favorite websites and online services to provide nearly perfect uptime in an
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enterprise setting hot swap can be used on some pretty unexpected stuff dead or
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working hard drives can be pulled out of redundant arrays and replaced or
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upgraded on the fly with no data loss and in the case of redundant power
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supplies even a power supply for a server can be swapped out without ever
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shutting it down but not everything can be hot swapped and there are many things
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an interface designer needs to consider to make hot swapping safe mechanical
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interfaces need to protect the user from mashing his or her fingers or getting
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zapped and similarly the electrical design of the interface and the software
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needs to be resilient enough to handle being suddenly disconnected in the
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middle of operation some things aren't designed to work for hot swap but might
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actually work like sim cards for cell phones and older ps2 mice but others
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must never be hot swaps because it would result in an instant software error
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causing the system to shut down and possibly hardware failure examples of
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these sorts of things include system memory graphics cards and cpus but
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this might not always even be the case technology is always changing and some
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of the early concepts for the project are a phone for example suggest that we
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might even see components like batteries become hot-swappable
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also who knows i sure don't
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speaking of things i don't know i don't know what could be a better sponsor for
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which is available because you can just listen to the whole thing on audiobook
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which i'm supposed to say otherwise i don't do all the things i'm supposed to
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say so there mockingjay by suzanne collins anyway
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today thanks for watching guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you
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just liked it leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fastest possible episodes just like this one and
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i think we're pretty much done here