I've NEVER been so FRUSTRATED... Hot-Swapping PCIe Cards
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,718 words · ~13 min read
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i remember seeing in the bio settings of
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this motherboard this very expensive motherboard an option for pci express
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hot swap which i have never personally tried
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before but what it sounds like is just
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putting pci express cards in and taking them off while this system is running
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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
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we hot swap every day so usb for example even though you would safely remove the
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device theoretically with the you know little prompt in the bottom corner
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anytime you are taking something out or putting something in
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without powering off first it is technically hot swap and some standards
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that don't support hot swap like ps2 keyboards for
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example you can still for the most part hot swap
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them without any ill effects with all of that said there are components out there
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that either cannot be hot swapped or
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have to be specifically designed for hot
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swap in order to function with it even components like
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cpus and memory can
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actually be hot swap but that's more of a server level feature where the system
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itself and usually some kind of a of a daughter board that that slides in or
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whatever else has to be designed for it because you can't just you can't just
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cut power to uh to a computer component and expect everything to operate
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normally now as for pci express
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i confess i haven't done a ton of research coming
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into this so it's possible that the device itself
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also needs to be designed for hot swap
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but then it's possible that it doesn't i don't know where we're
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going to find out today for those of you wondering the the titan
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x here i will not be hot swapping that that's
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just here so that we have a display output i think it's time for us to go
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find some victims so this is our selection of random pci
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express cards that are of sort of dubious value
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uh these actually got for free in scrapyard wars you know what let's start
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with these okay so uh
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oh yeah before we do this i should
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probably enable hot swap
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ah there it is
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no idea what any of these settings do
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sure looks good to me
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i wonder what's better black slots or
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gray slots i'm gonna try a gray slot
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oh this feels so wrong
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okay
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nothing catastrophic appears to have happened
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okay it's not showing up
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let's try a restart stop code driver power state failure
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go ahead and cut okay so one of three things happened here either you have to actually power
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off for it to be detected we're gonna try that first
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or we killed it or
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it was dead already which is quite possible this has been sitting on a
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shelf for literally years either way it can go over there now
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all right now this
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i am at least 40 percent sure works
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okay whoa now hold on a minute
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whoa hold on a minute i think that's more usb than we had
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before okay don't cut this clip because no one's
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gonna believe me if we cut this clip
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maybe i was wrong go ahead and cut so after powering down
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and turning it back on it's working
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did it not show up because the system had never seen this
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device before
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oh oh oh ouch oh uncorrectable error ouch go ahead and
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cut we're gonna disable it then
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we're gonna pull it
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we hot unplugged something
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am i gonna get away with a hardware changes scan
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i'm starting to wonder if these are just bugged on this computer
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look it's still in there but i know for a fact
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see i can prove that the hardware is not in there
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let's just go for it
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oh damn it go ahead and cut
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i'm gonna grab a different boot drive go ahead
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all right let's try a more fresh Windows
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enable oh there it goes
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go ahead and cut maybe the black slots are bad luck
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you let me down buddy go ahead and cut
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maybe we just need to try something that's not a storage device how about
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this network card
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go ahead and cut so what we think we know so far is that we haven't actually
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killed any of the hardware we've been experimenting with i did find a couple potential
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sacrificial cards here so this is like a 5450
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and then this is that titan that we brutally
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savaged
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so the AMD card seems to have given zero f's
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just like the network card um go ahead and cut this is like an og
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titan it's not it's not very high end anymore neither of them are showing up
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let's try a restart here oh my god is that Windows up i hate it
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go ahead and cut okay so we're having problems booting at all go ahead and cut good cut go ahead
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and cut holy sh no oh my what the
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don't prompt again no
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so the AMD card is showing up now
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i think what we have to do is try some more modern hardware
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a 750 series SSD and let's try a more modern graphics
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card a 1050 ti
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oh fans turned on
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that one's definitely getting power
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come on really
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has to be a driver thing
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so let's see if at least after just a soft reset
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they show up because that will tell us if maybe
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Windows is the issue wait what
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the graphics card's not showing up
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let's pull the SSD
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off
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let's fire up Windows server go ahead and cut
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okay okay bye uh so i'm an idiot um
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you don't have to enable this i didn't even read it this just says you have to
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enable this if your os does not support
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pci express hot plug ahead and cut
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so let's go straight for gold
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no here goes the usb drive nope network
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can Linux handle it better
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it showed up and then it crashed
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while we were trying Linux i was preparing a server
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2016 installation oh shut up
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best case scenario so we have the presence of mind to disable it before we
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pull it
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maybe there's some options or something go ahead and cut
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okay so we've reached the point in this project where it's time to talk to tech
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support um
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and i did find a really interesting article so this is an Intel white paper
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about their data center ssds but as you
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guys might have noticed when we were booted into ubuntu
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this SSD shows up as one of their data center ssds they're actually based on a
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very very similar platform in fact i believe they use the same pcb even so i
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was really hoping that this would behave similarly and they do support hot swap
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PCIe including surprise hot add or hot remove
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but native os hot plug no
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so we need to have that off
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okay BIOS hot plug support is only for if it
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doesn't support it natively which this says Windows does
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and we have to ensure that surprise hot plug registers are set correctly
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so i'm gonna try this
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while i wait for ASUS to get back to me go ahead and cut
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oh no
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go away
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all right well i guess if it never detects it it can never
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crash go ahead and cut i think i've been going about this all
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wrong i saw
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pci express hot plug in the BIOS
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and i went yeah
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heck yeah these slots
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but what if what if they actually mean
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pci express storage over u.2
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so this board is actually really unique come have a look at this in that it has
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four this is part of what it's using all those PCIe lanes on the CPU for it has
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four u.2 connectors so these
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are technically 4x PCIe slots
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effectively you can actually just run a cable off of them
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and plug them into a 16x slot
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what they're intended for though are NVMe drives like this one this is the
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same drive as this it's just that instead of this it's got this
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so the board might only be set up for that
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on these lanes i mean it's less dramatic looking but
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this is still potentially really cool which means
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go ahead and cut so i am not defeated
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our wonderful contacted ASUS gary
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has actually worked over the weekend it
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turns out the features there on the board
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and it's exposed in the BIOS it's not enabled
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so they have provided me with a beta BIOS that should enable it
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i actually wasn't that far off the board is only
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specifically designed to support this hot plug functionality
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on the u.2 ports so theoretically when i flash this BIOS
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it will enable or unlock that functionality
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close up
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update time this is weird it dropped me right into
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the BIOS which means i don't know what's going on
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even a SATA drive isn't showing up as bootable in here so like
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there it is can't boot to it
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it's not even beta BIOS it's like alpha BIOS
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okay you can cut i sent ASUS a complaining thing about
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not being able to boot and i got back
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did you rtfm they sent me instructions for a bunch of
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bio stuff to reconfigure in order to enable it
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we're gonna do that i mean i thought it was just a BIOS update
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okay so there is some crazy stuff in
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here i'm supposed to go to socket 1 ports 1a to 1d
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and here is where i am
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enabling hot plug and surprise hot plug
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for my u.2 ports
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okay this is great news
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reading the manual
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i want to see this work
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that's interesting go ahead and cut okay this is the raid
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driver we need
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there it is okay where's my drive
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there it is yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever okay
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here it is
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there it is
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but off camera
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i had another idea
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so there's hot plug options in the BIOS for
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other pci express uh slots on this board but ASUS has
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specifically told me that there's like a finished system that uses this board as
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a base that has a special backplane that enables the pci express slots themselves
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to be hot pluggable but that the standalone board doesn't do it so given
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that following their instructions so far has been my best bet i'm going to take
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their word for it but i have something special
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this is a u.2 to pci express adapter
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so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take what is effectively
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again a pci express slot
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and i want to hot plug it
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i don't know if this is going to work
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oh no dice why don't we try this one
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okay now oh
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you know what no how far has listening to manufacturer
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instructions ever gotten anyone so
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we're going to change not just ports 1a to 1d
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we're going to change all of the ports
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to surprise hot plug and hot plug
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and we are just going to yolo it and see what happens
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one last hurrah
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so something i don't know is if turning on hot plug on the slots could have some
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kind of adverse effect on some other functionality
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so first things first this is my best bet for hot pluggable
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just sanity check i want to try off the u.2 again
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see it's powered though see this is what
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this is what's whoa
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it's it's on
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it works oh it really works check it out check it
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out activity led it's fast even writing
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crazy now i want to push my luck
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oh
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it handled it gracefully the craziest thing is i didn't even have
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to like refresh device manager it was just like it was like plugging in a usb
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device so now we're gonna try the network card
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usb card maybe
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do you see that right there
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no okay hold on hold on
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usb stick check this out
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no it's working
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that's that usb drive
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now what we need to see is no blue screen
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it's gone no blue screen
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hot plug PCIe okay
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show me that drive activity
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maybe it just
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oh that is crazy now maybe it's slot specific
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i want to see this server network card work
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i'm like shaking which is not good i mean that's the
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most dangerous part of this apparently it's like
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screwing up and like touching metal on some contacts here something
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total madness there it is there it is
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i want to see it work though
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we are on the internet on a hot plugged
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okay
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do we keep pushing the boundaries brandon do you want to see a video card
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who do we punish NVIDIA or AMD
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NVIDIA what they ever do to you all right here we go
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okay fans are on i can't even believe this
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no way
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holy sh
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do you think it's gonna let me just like install a game or install the driver and
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like run a game like
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is this as crazy as i think it is we're just plugging and unplugging cards from
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a motherboard willy-nilly it's on
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we gotta show that there's no there's no tricks here
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like look this bench not plugged in
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this is nothing nothing nothing here
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this nothing nothing
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unbelievable this device is working properly
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i mean is basically everything going to work
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here the avermedia tv tuner card
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let's go back to the very first thing we tried
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i want to see this system compatibility checking can you imagine that just pop a
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graphics card in your system and install the driver and go
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holy crap it worked
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you saw it here first my friends
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hot swapping pci express cards
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in a powered system because you're just a mega baller like
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that and you don't play by the rules
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