I recently bought a Vantec EZ Swap EX mobile rack enclosure and was trying to set it up but run into a problem that I'm not able to eject a device once it is connected to an internal SATA port, for some reason the device is not recognized as hot pluggable and the only option to correctly eject a hard drive is to shutdown the machine. I did make sure that i have that port marked as hot pluggable in BIOS. I did try to connect just a hard drive without the enclosure just to make sure that it is not related to the enclosure but with the same result. I also run into the same problem with eSATA port but that was fixed by upgrading RST to 12.9 (see eSATA port does not support hot plugging on DQ77MK for more details). As a result of troubleshooting the eSATA port issue I've tried multiple versions of BIOS as well as multiple versions of RST drivers. And the only way i was able to make it work was not to use RST drivers at all, but use default Windows drivers (only tried with Windows 8.1). So what it looks like is that BIOS settings works as expected and default Windows drivers can see them and everything works as expected, but RST ignores those settings. I have this problem on two machines with DQ77MK motherboard, one using Windows 8.1 x64 using AHCI and another Windows 7 x64 with RAID configuration. I'm going to switch to RAID configuration on WIndows 8.1 machine as well, so not using Intel drivers is not an option.
DQ77MK with 0064 BIOS, version G39642-500
Windows 8.1 x64 (UEFI enabled), RST 12.9 (AHCI)
Windows 7 x64, RST 12.9 (RAID)
Thanks.