Here is something that has been bugging me for a long while. Modern chipsets support AHCI for hard drives which amongst other things is supposed to support hot swappable drives. In Windows this means you can plug a drive in any time and use it. The flip side is you should be able to unplug it anytime after dismounting it (Safely Remove Hardware).
But so far I have only had this successfully work with nVidia chipsets (nForce4 mainly) and some JMicron SATA controllers. On Intel chipsets I can plug a drive in but it never shows up in the Safely Remove Hardware list in Windows. And just un-pluging a drive can lead to all sorts of nasty problems.
Note that I always install the Intel drivers rather than using the Microsoft drivers and I have tried this using Server 2003/2008, Vista & 7.
So does Intel (ICH9/10) chipsets properly support hot swappable SATA?