I have an external "Icy Box" caddy containing a SATA 2 HDD which I use for backups. The caddy has both USB2 and eSATA ports, so I installed an eSATA bracket on my machine which just plugs into a SATA connection on the Gigabyte MoBo.
OS is W7 Pro 64bit.
Now once you've used eSATA going back to USB2 for backups is tediously slow to the extreme, but Windows 7 (bless it) does not load eSATA drivers by default, so I can't hot swap the caddy.
I've tried plugging it in to the running PC and scanning for hardware changes but that didn't do the trick, so I have to power down, start up the caddy THEN boot up the PC to get it to load the drivers on boot, which is a pain.
I also set the BIOS set to AHCI before installing W7 which I thought would do the trick but obviosly it hasn't.
So - question is...Can I get generic eSATA drivers that I can install that will stay loaded do I can hot swap the caddy?
As far as I'm aware eSATA is not hot swappable, well it wasn't a few years ago when I used it.
I used eSATA a few years back and I don't think it was hot swappable back then either.
We have an eSata caddy on one of our servers, running W2k8. I am told that provides hot swap support but there is an application , SataLINK ( by Silicon Image ), in the system tray to manage the caddy.
Google seems to imply that some are and some aren't depending on the drive and the controller. However if the OS sees it as a non removable device I wouldn't hot swap it for fear of data loss.
I'll try and find out a bit more about how ours works. I thought it was used for monthly backups, we use 2 1/2" sata drives rather than tapes, but apparently they are used in a USB caddy so obviously hot swapped using the normal 'Safely remove drive' facility.
I use HotSwap! (http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm) a lot for this - I've got a few add-on SATA controllers that don't advertise hot swap to Windows, but are physically capable of doing so (I think it's a mandatory part of the SATA specs).