Under normal circumstances, when using a system with an AHCI driver (not "Legacy" or "IDE") the SATA driver will report a removable device to Windows and the "Safely remove" icon will appear at the right end of the Start bar and you may click on it to facilitate safe disconnection. If the icon does not appear it means that the current installed driver for your eSATA host bus adapter does not support hot plugging- this may be due to a hardware limitation or simply that this feature is missing from the driver installed. Check with your eSATA host bus adapter vendor for updated drivers.
To safely disconnect a SATA device from a system that doesn't support Hot Plugging eSATA, please follow these instructions:
- Enter the Windows Device Manager (through Control Panel or right clicking on My Computer and going to Properties)
- Go to Disk Drives and find the disk you want to remove
- Right click on the desired disk drive and select Remove/Disable
- After performing this operation, you can remove the hard drive without risk of losing any data that is currently stored in cache memory.
NOTE: If you are re-attaching a drive after a remove operation as explained above, you must make sure that the HD is power cycled (power cable unplugged) before re-attaching the HD serial data cable.
There is also an independently developed utility to mimic the "safe remove" function on systems not supporting hot plugging, which may be downloaded here:
http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm
MicroNet does not endorse or make any claims on the quality, function, or stability of the linked software- use at your own risk.
Keywords: eSATA hot plug hot swap safe remove