On Windows 7 my esata harddrives aren't being recognized as "removeable", as far as I know the only safe way to unplug them is to power everything down. With Win XP my drives could be unpluged with the remove hardware selection.
Sounds like a driver issue, the driver needs to tell the OS that the drives are removable. Download the latest drivers for your mother board chipset or sata card and see if that helps. It may take awhile for the manufacturer to get updated drivers to address bugs with Windows 7 and their hardware. Don't forget, the OS hasn't even been released yet, you are still an unofficial beta tester and you can't expect drivers until after Oct 22nd.
are you using the RC or the final? Cause i had esata problems with the RC, on the final RTM the problems are gone now.
Make sure your SATA controller is set to AHCI mode. The default is probably IDE, which does not support SATA hotplugging.
Well the MB is an Abit IP35 so there won't be any new chipset drivers as they quit making MB's. The odd thing is I have two esata drives, with one Win 7 RTM is allowing me to hot-plug, the other is not. They are both controlled by the same chip on the MB.
Personally i just make sure that any Drives that i have in my E-sata Docks are not writing to the drive at the time i turn them off ( by watching the activity lights) The same applies for USB thumbdrives etc and i haven't managed to corrupt one yet. I have more of an issue when swapping E-sata drives in the docks. Sometimes windows detects the drive when the dock is powered on, other times it won't. It will always pick it up if the PC is booted with the drive in the dock. I could usually get it to work by unplugging the E-sata cable and plugging back in a few times ( will usually work eventually) however i have recently found an easier way is to do a "scan for hardware change" from device manager, then it picks it up 100% of the time. Ideally it would be good if there was a way to perform the scan for hardware change from command line ( so i could put a batch file on desktop for easy access) but a google search hasn't netted me any results new enough to work with Win 7.