Just to add my 5 cents (centos 5 cents that is har har)...
I have several plain jane seagate sata drives, connected mostly to
nforce4 sata (module sata_nv) controller, and a few connected to a
silicon image controller (sata_sil) ... hot swap is a non issue for
me. All my drives are part of MD raid sets - I down the drive using
mdadm, and then just pull it from the chassis (Supermicro 5 drive
chassis). Adding a new drive is equally easy, just slide it into the
chassis and use mdadm to add it to an array.
Gordon