Question : Problem: Hot-swap eSATA drives

I have an Adaptec 1225SA eSATA controller with two eSATA drives in Vantec Nexstar 3 cases attached, running in JBOD mode.  I am trying to figure out how to safely remove these drives from the system without shutting down the computer, as I have to frequently move them to another machine.

Others have told me that their eSATA drives appear in "Safely Remove Hardware", and they shut them down the same was as for USB drives.  Mine don't appear in Safely Remove Hardware though.  If I unplug the eSATA cable, or power off the drive enclosure, the drive disappears in windows, and it reappears no problem when I reconnect the drive.  My worry is that by doing this, the write cache may not be flushed to the drive prior to removal, and I might lose data.

Anyone know how to safely remove these things (i.e. ensure the cache is flushed prior to removal)?

Answer : Problem: Hot-swap eSATA drives

I think you need another controller. Yours is a raid controller, and those usually can't be used for disks that aren't connected as an array or similar. A raid controller that supports hot swap like yours will also not show the drives as removable within windows. They are meant to pull out the defective drive in a raid 1 or raid 5 array while the system is running, then just plugging in the replacement HD, which will then rebuild the array to include the new HD. This is nothing the OS needs to know about and is therefore handled by the controller on it's own.

What you want is a non raid controller that supports hot swapping, so the attached HD's are just normal disks to your OS. Just look for a SATA controller without raid, but make sure it supports hot swapping.