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I have a Gigabyte P67A. I have attached one of those Thermaltake SATA docks with the eSATA connector on the dock. I have connected the dock to a regular SATA port on the board with a SATA-eSATA cable.

Is there a way to force any drive on that controller port to appear as hot-swappable or removable?

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  • Installing Intel's RST (Rapid Storage Technology) driver/software allowed me to hot-swap safely.
    – alphadogg
    Mar 29, 2011 at 1:54

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The driver for your motherboard's SATA controller must support the hot-swap feature in order for hot-swapping to work. If I recall correctly, the first generation of motherboards with SATA did not support hot-swapping. The later generations did with the newer chipsets, but the manufacturer had to provide the necessary drivers for it. So, there is no way to force hot-swapping if it does not support it.

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  • I have one of the newest Intel chipsets, the P67. (In fact, it's so new, they want it back! :) ) Anyways, anyone know if that chipset supports hotswap? Does it have to be BIOS enabled?
    – alphadogg
    Feb 15, 2011 at 1:31
  • It should have a setting in the BIOS to enable hot-swap and you still need to get a driver that supports hot-swapping.
    – Metril
    Feb 15, 2011 at 3:39
  • Unless it is obscurely-named, there doesn't seem to be one. I have emailed Gigabyte to ask. Might as well get it straight from the horse's mouth...unless the horse doesn't know who to ask...
    – alphadogg
    Feb 17, 2011 at 0:05
  • Make sure it's set to AHCI rather than IDE. If you switch this you'll need to run the startup repair off your Windows disc.
    – Mark Sowul
    Mar 29, 2011 at 0:47
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I'm pretty sure there's a way to hotswap your SATA dock with a program. I used to run on a P35 system quite similar to the way you are using your SATA dock right now. Just install a very small but useful program called Hotswap! You can download it here

It worked fine on my P35 system on Vista and is compatible with Windows 7 too. It is quite easy to use.

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