eSATA removable drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I have an eSATA external hard drive case.  I want to hotplug / unplug it.

My system is Fedora 11.

I added an external eSATA port on my desktop computer by adding a bracket 
(with an internal cable connected to one of the ordinary SATA sockets on 
the motherboard.)

The SATA controller is an intel ICH9R.  To make hotplug work, I needed
to go the computer's BIOS and change the SATA mode to AHCI (it was
IDE).

I can now hotplug the drive.

I cannot unplug the drive.  If I tell the system to eject the drive,
it complains:

    # eject /dev/sdi
    eject: device "/dev/sdi" doesn't have a removable or hotpluggable flag
    # cat /sys/block/sdi/removable 
    0
(I don't know where or what a hotpluggable flag is.)

I guess that makes sense: the system doesn't know that I added an
eSATA bracket.

What are the reasonable ways to tell the system that that SATA port is
an eSATA port and should allow for hotplugging/unplugging?

My guess is some kind of HAL rule but I'm not an initiate.  Maybe
something in here would work:
  <http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_hotswap_UltraBay_devices>

Surely lots of people have already encountered this issue.  If so,
there ought to be a non-wizard way to handle it.