I recently installed Windows 7 64 bit on an Aus P6T with 2 SATA hard
drives. I have an icon in the task bar, the same one that appears
when you plug an USB stick or camera in, that shows my 2 hard drives,
all the partitions, and gives me the open to eject the drives. I know
SATA drives are hot swappable in AHCI mode, but I can't imagine a
reason why you would want to do so while the OS is running. In any
case, I have to make that option disappear before somebody comes
along and "safely removes" the wrong device., but does anyone know
why this option is a good idea?
There are drive caddies (fit in a 5.25" bay and mount a 3.5 or 2.5"
hard drive) that allow you to quickly swap a hard drive while the
computer is running. Probably wouldn't be a good idea to swap the OS
drive, but if you had a second drive in one of those drive trays, it
would be a good idea to stop the device before yanking it out. That
way, anything in cache is written to the disk before you delete it
forever.
Anyway, the OS has no way to know how the drive is physically mounted.
So, some programmer made the safe bet. -Dave
