Safely Remove (hidden) Hardware

A while ago I bought an Icy Dock MB-559 external enclosure (which lets you swap drives by means of attaching a tray/carrier to the drive and slot it into the enclosure, but that's an aside), and connected this to the eSATA connector on the back of my motherboard (by today's standards, a slightly aging ASUS A8N32-SLi).

Since then I noticed that the drive connected to the eSATA controller never showed up in the list of devices in "Safely Remove Hardware" in Windows. For a while I was just too lazy to bother with it - everything worked fine except I couldn't eject it at will (i.e. to swap it with another drive).

Fast forward a bit, and I decided to look into this.

Any reference I could find on the net clearly showed that Silicon Image stated that the SiI 3132 controller that sits on this motherboard supports "hot plug" or "hot swap" or whatever you choose to call it.

It turns out that hot plug is indeed supported, it just isn't showed in "Safely Remove Hardware". This is what Silicon Image says you need to do:

This feature is not explicitly highlighted in our current drivers, but all SATA controllers from Silicon Image do support hot plug capability. To remove a drive from a powered up system, do the following:

• 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

This is all well and good, but very tedious, so I went looking for something a bit easier and quicker. There doesn't seem to be much out there ("USB Safely Remove" only lists USB devices), except some command line utilities. It's arguable whether these are any faster to use manually, but they can obviously be automated easily.

Update 13/01/2008

And then, randomly, I stumble upon this little utility, which is exactly what I want: Safely Hotswap Hardware

Resources

• Tips for USB pen drives (Section: Safe Removal)
• Sysinternals Sync
• Safely Hotswap Hardware