When you insert any hardware into Windows, you need to make sure that you use the “Safely Remove Hardware” option in Windows when you are removing it. This is because if the USB drive is being accessed by any file, then quick removal will corrupt the files. The Safely Remove Hardware option is available in the system tray in Windows. HotSwap is a freeware tool which provides a better UI for Safely Remove Hardware option in Windows 10 making it user-friendly. It provides additional options and also ensures that all data are written and flushed to the disk before the device to be hot-swapped, so you can use SATA/eSATA drive as a removable device much alike USB/IEEE1394 drive.
From the system tray, you can select the device types for which you want to enable HotSwap. Once the device types are enabled, you can see all the removal drives listed in the app and you can select the ones which you want to safely remove.
Features of HotSwap:
- Friendly user interface equivalent to the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the notification area.
- Ensures all volumes on the drive are not in use before removing it.
- Spin-down the drive to remove the drive in safe.
- Support a drive other than fixed disk drive.
- Supports the command line mode to run without graphical user interface.
If you select any drive for safely remove, you get the notification that the drive can be safely removed.
HotSwap app is basically designed to give a better experience of managing your removable devices with Device Manager by giving it a simpler and easy to use interface and more options. The app is free of cost and comes in portable version and supports all versions of Windows including Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. The app also comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions.
