eSATA Drivers Windows 7

[stevenrw]

I have an external "Icy Box" caddy containing a SATA 2 HDD which I use for backups. The caddy has both USB2 and eSATA ports, so I installed an eSATA bracket on my machine which just plugs into a SATA connection on the Gigabyte MoBo.
OS is W7 Pro 64bit.
Now once you've used eSATA going back to USB2 for backups is tediously slow to the extreme, but Windows 7 (bless it) does not load eSATA drivers by default, so I can't hot swap the caddy.
I've tried plugging it in to the running PC and scanning for hardware changes but that didn't do the trick, so I have to power down, start up the caddy THEN boot up the PC to get it to load the drivers on boot, which is a pain.
I also set the BIOS set to AHCI before installing W7 which I thought would do the trick but obviosly it hasn't.
So - question is...Can I get generic eSATA drivers that I can install that will stay loaded do I can hot swap the caddy?

[Steve]

As far as I'm aware eSATA is not hot swappable, well it wasn't a few years ago when I used it.

[Gary]

I used eSATA a few years back and I don't think it was hot swappable back then either.

[MisterW]

We have an eSata caddy on one of our servers, running W2k8. I am told that provides hot swap support but there is an application , SataLINK ( by Silicon Image ), in the system tray to manage the caddy. 

[Steve]

Google seems to imply that some are and some aren't depending on the drive and the controller. However if the OS sees it as a non removable device I wouldn't hot swap it for fear of data loss.

[MisterW]

I'll try and find out a bit more about how ours works. I thought it was used for monthly backups, we use 2 1/2" sata drives rather than tapes, but apparently they are used in a USB caddy so obviously hot swapped using the normal 'Safely remove drive' facility.

[gizmo71]

I use HotSwap! a lot for this - I've got a few add-on SATA controllers that don't advertise hot swap to Windows, but are physically capable of doing so (I think it's a mandatory part of the SATA specs).