Someone please clear this up for me - Hot Swapping SATA Drives

[t_aitch]

Ive been transferring a file share from one spare hard disk to my main harddisk, becuase the spare hard disk is being sold to a friend.

There is nothing on the disk now, can i "Safely Remove" the drive and plug in another drive in windows xp?

This has been bugging me for ages, and i cant get a definite answer on the subject, ive looked in the sticky, but no luck?

Anyone?

 

[keyser]

I theory you can, but I'm not sure how the bios gets on with this.. I guess the best order would be remove data cable then power and when pluging one in power then data..

Why don't you turn the pc off and remove it like a PATA drive?

If you do hot swapping, it my burn down your house, in which case i'm not to blame

 

[Captain Fizz]

Why don't you turn the pc off and remove it like a PATA drive?

Indeed.

In theory, the interface supports hot-swapping.

If you are confident you can remove a molex, without giving any "brown" power to the drive (as you are unplugging it, one pin just touching and no more as you are taking it off) then feel free.

But as there is not a switch on your molex/sata power cable... Shutting down the PC is by far the best and safest option.

Just pretend it's a normal drive.
Even on proper servers with hot-swappable HDD's... Generally the server is downed to replace drives.