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Since SATA has standardized I/O and power connectors, you can buy a hard drive dock for SATA drives. Has anyone used one of these? How convenient are they? Can you hot-plug the drive? How do you disconnect it safely?

I only have one or two hard drives not mounted in a case at a given time, and I'm a bit leery of leaving hard drive electronics exposed (I like to drink at my computer, and I have a cat) so I just use a conventional enclosure. That said I would imagine it could be pretty convenient.

Hot-plugging is supported with SATA hard drives. If it's a USB or Firewire-driven dock, it should automatically present a "safely remove hardware" icon in Windows. With external SATA connections, it's a bit more esoteric - I think it's partly dependent on drivers and partly on whether or not your SATA ports are configured for AHCI or ATA operation. I know that my external enclosure, when connected via eSATA, doesn't present a 'Safely Remove' icon right now.

I would imagine that in Linux it wouldn't matter as much - you could just unmount the volume, turn off the dock, and remove the hard drive.

Is it an internal dock (bay) or external?

I've had bad experiences with the internal kind - the docking mechanism tends to be finicky, not always getting the connection right, while the model I've had the misfortune to experience was noisy as hell with its added fans. All in all, I would never consider buying one again and would go for a eSATA based enclosure solution, getting an eSATA controller if necessary.

Hot-plug functionality is the same on all connections of this type (docks, bays, enclosures etc. over (e)SATA, USB or Firewire) - it works. To prevent data loss it is preferable to set the cache to write immediately to the disk (like with memory sticks and the like) if you plan to use the hot-plug capability, although that carries some performance penalties. Or, as Uranium notes, you can always use the Safely Remove Hardware icon, if available.

Are we talking about 2.5 or 3.5" enclosures?

I've also had poor experiences with internal hot-swap bays, in the same way as Netko. After some time (less with rough treatment which is easy for it to recieve in an office etc) the contact becomes very unreliable and the fit poor.

What about the external ones, like this?

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... CatId=2785

Since there's no caddy or tray involved, and the unit has a spring-loaded platform covering the port, that looks fine. The SATA connectors give pretty positive contact, and as long as you don't jam it down too hard (which I confess would be a huge tempation for me, given the old-fashioned orientation ) I imagine it'd avoid the common bay issues.

I've never used one of these docking systems, but I hotplug SATA drives all the time and never have any issues. The only consideration is that the SATA controller must be set to AHCI mode (which is preferable for performance anyway).