Your drives need to be set to AHCI, this enables the hot swapping features of SATA drives.
Now, all your SATA drives will appear
when you use the “Safely remove
device” icon near the clock in the
bottom right corner. If you choose to
remove a drive, you can eject it from
there and then take it out and put in
a new one. This is where the problems
start to arrive though. Sometimes,
this approach works without a problem,
but sometimes Windows simply goes
silent, and acts as though nothing has
been connected at all. Other times, it
tells you that it has found
partitions, but that they are in RAW
format, and have to be reformatted!
After living with this for a couple of
days, I decided that there had to be a
more stable way of doing this, and
that was when I came across
HotSwap!. This piece of software
is made for managing hot-swap drives
in Windows, and once installed, allows
you not only to scan for new drives (
and load them properly! ), but also to
safely remove them AFTER doing a
spin-down.
After running this stand-alone .exe,
you can set it to autostart with
Windows. After that, whenever you want
to swap a drive, just right-click the
hotswap icon at the bottom right near
your clock, safely remove the device
you want to swap, exchange the drives
and choose “Scan for changes” in the
HotSwap! menu and up comes your drive!
Happy hot-swapping!
Text taken from here
