SATA AHCI RAID Hot Swapping

[Philip Rhoades]

People,

I have this motherboard:

   http://www.asus.com/au/Motherboards/Z97AUSB_31

I boot Fedora 24 x86_64 from a single SATA Linux drive in one of four 
hot-swap bays but I occasionally want to look at old backup drives 
without shutting down the computer, inserting or extracting the drive 
and starting up the computer again.  It appears I should enable the AHCI 
option for RAID functionality (even if I only have a single boot drive 
installed) and then that will allow hot swapping.  My concern is the 
warning message I get about turning on AHCI when I start to make the 
change in BIOS - about the possibility of destroying my boot disk! - 
does anyone know about this stuff?

   dmesg | grep ahci

gives this:

[    0.343128] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 3.0
[    0.343211] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0300 32 slots 6 ports 6 Gbps 
0x1 impl SATA mode
[    0.343228] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq led clo pio slum part 
ems apst
[    0.343606] scsi host0: ahci
[    0.343703] scsi host1: ahci
[    0.344391] scsi host2: ahci
[    0.345073] scsi host3: ahci
[    0.345752] scsi host4: ahci
[    0.346433] scsi host5: ahci

so the drivers are already being loaded without the BIOS being 
configured for AHCI?  From a lot of Googling, it appears that most 
people are turning on AHCI for a RAID setup - but that doesn't apply to 
me . .

Thanks,

Phil.

-- 
Philip Rhoades

PO Box 896
Cowra  NSW  2794
Australia
E-mail:  phil(a)pricom.com.au