How to properly eject / remove hotswappable sata drive?

[Tim]

On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 21:24 +0200, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:
> Aren't all sata drives removable and hotpluggable?

No.  Both the drive and the host interface have to support it.  You
should be able to expect ESATA (external SATA) connected drives and
hosts to support it, because external drives need hotplug support.  You
should expect internal ones not to, and consider it a bonus if they do.

How do you tell ESATA apart from SATA?  Well, for one thing, there's
different plugs.  The ESATA plug is slightly more robust, as it needs to
be, to survive being plugged and unplugged, a lot.  Unfortunately, I
don't think it's robust enough.

As far as properly unmounting drives go.  In this day and age, you
shouldn't have to go through some other utility.  You should be able to
click on a drive's desktop icon and unmount/eject it from there.  Also,
if a drive has buttons, you should be able to press something on the
drive to initiate a disconnect.  If not, the designer is a cretin,
because users expect to be able to simply connect and disconnect things,
without having to go through some procedure.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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