SATA hot plug-in

My Medion is having difficulty powering up in the morning. I have to switch the power off at the wall socket, wait a few seconds until the power LED flashes, and then try again. Problem is getting worse and I now have to go through this several times before it finally bursts into life. I know I'm going to have to replace the PSU, but until I can get around to that I need to keep it going.

It has an external SATA HDD in a bay on the top of the tower and I guess if that wasn't present the reduction in load may help but I have no idea whether it is safe to hot plug an eSATA drive?

 

Seem to have found a fix for this. HotSwap! enables the Safely Remove feature, so external SATAs can be safely removed in the same way as USB drives. The drive isn't automatically detected when reconnected, but the program has a scan for hardware changes feature in the tray icon. Seems to work well on this Medion MD8818 but doubtless depends on BIOS and mobo versions so may not work for everyone.

Win 7 x64