Hot swapping eSATA/SATA hard drives

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

So...basically I am back up and running now with a bit of a different PC configuration where the only drive I have in the case is a non-system data drive. The boot drive is in an external drive dock that uses eSATA and my backup drive is an external enclosure that also uses eSATA.

The problem that I am wondering about is there is no problem with hot swapping drives be it swapping in or swapping out but the issue I have with swapping out is possible data integrity corruption if the drive isn't totally finished doing whatever it is doing or Windows decides to randomly write some system related thing to it.

Since both of my external eSATA drives look like they are normal drives to the motherboard, even though there is extra circuitry between the HD and the motherboard, how do you safely disconnect them?

Sure you can just turn the drive off when you think it isn't doing anything and yeah that will probably work most all of the time but if there is a better way to do it I would like to "safely remove" the hardware.

SOOooooo, I found a solution in the form of an .exe that you don't even need to install, my favorite!, that will function the same way you remove USB/Firewire storage.

You can get it here at the bottom of the page:

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

It is really weird because I can actually dismount the drive that is connected to the motherboard inside my computer case.


My external does get an error message occasionally when I dismount it BUT it looks like it is still doing something because any open folder I have gets closed when I use the HotSwap!.exe


Anyway...anyone else have another way to do this?

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

I just realized that if I have the my computer folder open the HotSwap exe will give an error message. If I close it and then try it again it dismounts without error.