AMS Electronics has an external harddrive enclosure that takes a SATA drive and interface with the PC on either a USB2 or SATA interface. I have been using drive enclosures that has the USB interface and know that they are hot pluggable. But does this hot pluggable also apply to the SATA interface? I mean when the SATA connection is made with this enclosure, as far as the computer is concerned, the physical external drive is internal. Therefore, all the properties of SATA apply to the enclosure if I use the SATA interface. This begs the question of if I want to turn on or off this enclosure while it is using SATA connection, do I simply turn off the power to the enclosure or should I shut down the PC first.
I heard that there is still some debate as to whether SATA is hot pluggable. This is still a controversy even with SATA II. To make things more confusing, the organization that oversees the SATA specs now comes out with SATA 2.5. (There is also a SATA 2 spec that is not to be "confused" with SATA II). As far as I can tell, any drive or device that has the SATA 2.5 logo on must be hot plugable. If this is true, then all the non-SATA 2.5 devices are not really hot plugable.
I heard that there is still some debate as to whether SATA is hot pluggable. This is still a controversy even with SATA II. To make things more confusing, the organization that oversees the SATA specs now comes out with SATA 2.5. (There is also a SATA 2 spec that is not to be "confused" with SATA II). As far as I can tell, any drive or device that has the SATA 2.5 logo on must be hot plugable. If this is true, then all the non-SATA 2.5 devices are not really hot plugable.