Hot Swapping SATA drives in Windows
Howdy gang. I know I don't write posts very often, and I apologize. I will try to be more engaged with this site.
My Desktop Computer (which hasn't gotten it's own blog post yet 
almost been 1 year) has a "drive toaster" as I call it. basically a piece that fits in a 5.25" cd-drive bay that accepts hard drives, both 2.5" and 3.5". Here's a picture of what I'm talking about.
Sorry for the poor quality. But it's better than no picture at all right!?
Well the biggest problem I've had with this is when I insert a drive while Windows is running, it doesn't mount or see the drive at all. The only way I could get a drive to show up is by rebooting. HUGE pain. But that pain is no longer....
Enter "Hot Swap".
Hot Swap is a piece of software that sits in your system tray. Yeah I know, you have enough things sitting in your system tray don't you? Just be happy that Windows 7 hides them for you rather nicely. Anyway it sits in the tray with an icon much like the "Safely remove hardware" icon but with a RED arrow instead of a green one.
Now all you have to do is insert the drive (or plug it into SATA another way, maybe eSATA) and right click on the new icon. Choose "Scan for Hardware Changes" at the top and BAM your drive shows up just like all your other ones. Isn't that nice? No more rebooting. If you can't tell I'm pretty excited about this one.
Here is the DOWNLOAD LINK for Hot Swap.
I found this from this thread. Apparently most SATA controllers support hotswapping (note I said most, not all. If your SATA controller doesn't, you're SOL) but does not work correctly with Windows Safely Remove Hardware. Thanks to Hot Swap this is no longer an issue.