I just bought a new high end motherboard from Asus, the one that has the 955
chipset. It has an eSATA port in the back. I have been doing some searching
and was surprised to find so little info on this. From what I have uncovered,
eSATA is 100% hot pluggable. That means if I can connect to this port an
eSATA external enclosure with a SATA drive inside, while the PC is on, I can
turn off the external harddrive like I would with USB and Firewire external
drives. However, I cannot find any info on how does XP handle eSATA external
enclosures. In fact, I cannot even find an eSATA eternal harddrive enclosure
on the Web shopping sites. Does XP treat an eSATA drive as external
USB/Firewire drives in terms of hot pluggability? That is, there will be an
icon with the green arrow in the System Tray when I plug in an eSATA drive
through which I can use to tell XP that I am about to unplug the eSATA drive
from the motherboard?