Use a HDD/SSD like a floppy drive via Sata?

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TheGriffinmp

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Jan 28, 2016
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So here is the scenario. I do a lot of photography and I have two PCs (Windows 10/7) that I use. I just installed IcyDock Tough Armor hotswap SATA cages. I want to be able to swap the SSD between the two PCs as if it were a thumb drive/floppy. Transferring over the network is not ideal because it can be damn near 500GB of photos.

How do I safely "eject" a Sata connected drive? Or do I just pop it out when nothing is writing to it and hope for the best?
 
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Some BIOSes (such as many recent ASUS ones) have an option to configure one or more motherboard SATA ports as external ports, which Windows will then see as "hot pluggable" and give you the little "Safely remove hardware" icon that you get for a USB drive. Have a look in your BIOS settings and see if you have this.

Failing that, I've used an application called "HotSwap!" on various servers over many years to allow me to remove SATA drives mounted in a front-panel caddy from systems safely. It unmounts the drive, flushes the cache, spins it down if it's a hard drive (I guess SSDs would interpret this as a "get ready to be powered off" message) then asks Windows to remove the device. It gives you a system tray icon similar to a red...
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JaredDM

JaredDM

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Jul 8, 2015
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It is best to unmount it first, as you will risk logical corruption issues just hot yanking it out of the system. However it will work that way generally speaking. Just have to be sure that indexing and any background processes that might access it are disabled.

If you want to disconnect it properly you'll just want to create yourself a convenient to Computer Management in Administrative Tools. From in there you can right click a drive and take it offline. Inside of Computer Management there's the disk management where you'll find it.

Alternately there are some apps which are geared to this purpose and will give you a tray icon.
 
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molletts

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Jun 16, 2009
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Some BIOSes (such as many recent ASUS ones) have an option to configure one or more motherboard SATA ports as external ports, which Windows will then see as "hot pluggable" and give you the little "Safely remove hardware" icon that you get for a USB drive. Have a look in your BIOS settings and see if you have this.

Failing that, I've used an application called "HotSwap!" on various servers over many years to allow me to remove SATA drives mounted in a front-panel caddy from systems safely. It unmounts the drive, flushes the cache, spins it down if it's a hard drive (I guess SSDs would interpret this as a "get ready to be powered off" message) then asks Windows to remove the device. It gives you a system tray icon similar to a red version of the Windows hardware removal icon and can be easily configured to ignore your system drive or other devices you don't want to hot-unplug.
 
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