Vista - using removeable hard drive trays with Vista Home Premium x64

I just recently built a new system with Vista Home Premium x64. I have two hot swap hard drive trays that I installed with 750 GB sata hard drives. They do not show up in the "safely remove hardware" list but my hard drive containing Vista does. How do I set up the two hot swap trays so that I can swap hard drives while Vista is running?

Thanx.

since the disks are SATA, I don't think there will be a problem or any need to "safely remove" them first, before you can disconnect them or re-connect them.

If the disks are SATA powered (this means if the power cable giving power to the disks is the new SATA slim style, and not the regular 4-pins power cable) you should be able to plug them and unplug them JUST AS YOU WOULD with external USB disks. I've been doing this for years to SATA disks and even without trays. Just plug them on, plug them off.

If you're not sure though, just go to Device Manager, right click your hard disks, select properties, and in Policies tab, select "optimize for quick removal".

Thanx for the response, I've tried the device manager but all the options under the "Policies" tab are grayed out and cannot be changed (they're set on "optimized for performance") any help on this?

I just tried removing one of the hard drives while Vista was running. The drive was still visible in My Computer and I could also navigate the directories of the hard drive (I'm guessing they were still in the cache) for about 4 minutes. Then, when I reconnected the hard drive, Vista never recognized it until I rebooted the system.

Hi deltatechx

You can only use removeable hard drives and remove and reconnect them whilst your system is running through 2 types of interface. The first of these is USB, and the second is SATA. This has to be a specific form of SATA that is designed for this, known as eSATA. This has to be supported on the motherboard, and may also need enabling in your BIOS. Check your motherboard manual to see if this is the case. If not, then the only way around it is to use the USB interface or to swap them around whilst the system is powered down.

You can check your BIOS settings and set the Hard Disk Native mode to SATA, of it's not. (check for IDE/SATA settings, SATA/PATA etc) . That will help on seeing the greyed-out options on Device Manager.

also, a tip to help Windows detect the unplugged drives, and the re-plugged ones, is to go to Device Manager and right click - Scan for hardware changes...although this is just a trick to make it work, not a solution.

I have 6 regular SATA ports and 2 gSATA ports that are purple. The motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P.

I have both of my removable hard drives hooked up to the purple gSATA ports and can now remove and connect them while Vista is running. I still cannot change anything in the "Policies" tab and they are both set to "Optimize for Performance".