How can I safely remove a SATA disk from a running system?

I sometimes need to plug a disk into a disk bay. At other times, I have the very weird setup of connecting a SSD using a SATA-eSATA cable on my laptop while pulling power from a desktop. How can I safely remove the SATA disk from the system? This Phoronix forum thread has some suggestions: > justsumdood wrote: >> An(noymous)droid wrote: >> What then do you do on the software side before unplugging? Is it a simple "umount /dev/sd"[drive letter]? > after unmounting the device, to "power off" (or sleep) the unit: > > hdparm -Y /dev/sdX > (where X represents the device you wish to power off. for example: /dev/sdb) > > this will power the drive down allowing for it's removal w/o risk of voltage surge. Does this mean that the disk caches are properly flushed and powered off thereafter? Another suggestion from the same thread: > chithanh wrote: > All SATA and eSATA hardware is physically able to be hotplugged (ie. not damaged if you insert/pull the plug). > > How the chipset and driver handles this is another question. Some driver/chipset combinations do not properly handle hotplugging and need a warmplug command such as the following one: > > echo 0 - 0 > /sys/class/scsi_host/hostX/scan > Replace X with the appropriate number for your SATA/eSATA port. I doubt whether is the correct way to do so, but I cannot find some proof against it either. So, what is the correct way to remove an attached disk from a system? Assume that I have already unmounted every partition on the disk and ran sync. Please point to some official documentation if possible, I could not find anything in the Linux documentation tree, nor the Linux ATA wiki .