Steve said:
I don't know about you, but I don't usually remove connectors from internal
drives when the machine is switched on and running.
Actually, a number of hardware standards support hot-plugging.
SATA is one of them. PS/2 (keyboard/mouse) is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_swapping
SATA was specifically designed for server backplanes. You can
unplug a drive "hot" from a server backplane. The connector
has "advanced" pins, that make contact first, to ensure good
electrical conditions for the operation. The only tricky
part with SATA (or SAS), is spinning down the drive before
ejecting it from the enclosure. That's the part that makes
me nervous. You can actually "Safely Remove" SATA (the topic
of this thread)
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Doing a "Safely Remove", might even
provide an opportunity to issue park and spin-down commands.
The only drive you can't "Safely Remove", is the drive with
C: on it, because "the file system is busy".
The AHCI driver supports Hot Swap. Because I don't use AHCI
on my computers here, I never get to see that "Safely Remove"
icon for my hard drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahci
"AHCI is separate from the SATA 3 Gbit/s standard, although
it exposes SATA's advanced capabilities (such as
hot swapping and native command queuing) such that
host systems can utilize them."
Paul