Is this really a good idea with cumbersome design of the cables or is hotswap another jive word?
Yes it is a good idea. Hot swap occurs easily because you buy a special removable hotswap tray for your SATA drive. For some people, hot-swapping is very convenient (especially on a secondary drive that can be used for data that can easily be transferred from one system to another). It’s one of those things you don’t really think about until you realize some of the very cool ways that it would be really, really useful to have One additional aspect that would have; been helpful is the issue of master/slave jumper settings. I believe that this has been eliminated with SATA but I’m not sure of the specifics. – RT. A) Yes, SATA completely eliminates any Master/Slave issues as seen with ATA drives (one SATA header, one cable, one drive). Many motherboards will have either two headers (which will control two SATA devices) and an older ATA header (which will control two ATA devices set as Master/Slave). Other boards will have four SATA headers to control 4 SATA devices. The SCSI standard on t
