Paul wrote:
Carl wrote:
I have two PCs.

The one with MSI motherboard does not Hot Swap SATA Hard drives.

The one with Gigabyte P4 Titan does Hot Swap SATA hard drives.
(P4M800)
Not a clue about Hot Swap is on the box.

How can I tell before choosing a new motherboard if it supports SATA
Hot Swap?

Carl

See the section "Advanced Host Controller Interface" here, where
the existence of AHCI equates to Hot Plug support. This isn't strictly
true, as hot plug was evident before ACHI drivers existed. But for the
purposes of dealing with modern motherboards, it is a good start
at identifying a motherboard that might support hot plug.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ata

The trouble with this is, no one in the industry is going to
expend an extra line of ink in their documentation, to say
it is supported and part of their hardware. So you have to
assume it is present, when you see something like AHCI.

Before the AHCI driver came out, one assumption was that
a SATA 300MB/sec interface and its associated driver, would
support hot plug. The state of development, when SATA 150MB/sec
interfaces were the norm, was that hot plug wasn't included.
The connectors have always been designed to support it (the
connectors have staggered pins for proper interconnect
sequence.)

You can blame the organization that invented SATA, for
the sorry state of feature identification.

Paul

Thanks for that!
The Wikpediao link,
under the "Power section, last paragraph... I find:

"...Understanding this, drive manufacturers have largely left the 3.3 V power lines unused. However, without 3.3 V
power, the SATA device may not be able to implement hotplugging as mentioned in the previous paragraph."

That sound like hot plug can also be a device issue.

However, in my experience, I was trying the same device on two different systems. That is how I became aware.