The concept of "fixed" and "removable" has never been completely clear. I mean, we've been using removable EIDE drives for years. But they're getting harder to find, thus my experiments with esata. I think the word you're looking for is "hotswap".
It's clearly not just an OS issue, but also a chipset issue. The motherboard must be able to indicate to the OS when devices are connected and disconnected. And the OS has to be able to make sense out of what it's told. Win98 requires drivers for this, WinXP and Vista don't. Of course it helps if the chipset is specifically designed for hot swapping. I've rarely had trouble with USB or 1394 removables, whether the drive was EIDE or SATA. But I've never been able to hotswap directly on the EIDE bus, and now am having some trouble hotswapping on (e)SATA. Oh and, both internal and esata cables are shielded. It's just that esata has a sturdier connector. On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Fred Holmes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > SATA is just a new way of attaching "fixed" drives. E-SATA is an external > connection that is shielded (uses shielded cable), while internal SATA > connections are unshielded. While in principle, one could make such > connections "removable" (or whatever), I don't think it is done by default. > Is Vista supposed to make all SATA drives removable? Just those for which > the motherboard supports it? ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
