You cant just yank out the IDE controller Nor Shut off the power without preparing the disk. The software probably tries to force the condition of the drive to shut down. But the individual behavior of each IDE device, may be slightly different. Anyways, Generally speaking hotswapable SATA or IDE is used for SERVER tech, where system requirements require 100% uptime.
In school, we were challenged by a good techer to create a server with 100% up time with a very heavy load. We choose the computer industry leader at the time (Compaq) and one of their VERY large servers. It was a 255 cluster PC, with a seperate Hard Drive units, and redundant main control boards. On a single processor unit failure, the software would shut that processor off, and it would allow you to hotswap in a new one. It used multiple powersupplies all hotswappable, The Hard Drive contained 2 identical interfaces that would connect to the main computer to insure that if one of our Hard Drive Array control boards failed, it would use the second... It of course had RAID-5, with SCSI (hot swappable).
Every team except for mine failed at providing 100% true uninterupted service. They all failed at providing 2 seperate network device connections for redundancy, and they failed to purchase 2 UPS+Generators. Every single one of them who thought of a Generator failed to think what would happen if one failed. We also made sure that we had 2 seperate Airconditioning Units
We passed with a 100, everyone else... well, they didnt do as good as us... The machine and all the redundancy went over a cool 1 million, but it would handle the tasks associated with a major internet router, with room to spare for atleast 5 years (assuming the trend data was correct).
This is important because hot swappable was originally built for this perpose. It was built to handle Drive Arrays for Servers to prevent system downtime. It wasnt built for Desktop users, and for Hard Drives it doesnt make much sense to use these as hot swappable.
That is until they reached the Backup issues they are having now. Magnetic Tape backup has become impractical, and CD/DVD/HDDVD's are too small for most users, while not providing the reliability needed.
They now use USB 2.0 (or for the FREAKS firewire) Hard Drives that you plug in, back up, then remove from the system (and unplug).
These are important features, PSU failure, lightning, flood, etc may damage your computer devices, but it wont damage a Hard Drive in a waterproof safe
USB 2.0 is 300mbps (or so I was told... which means it may not be that value), and all hard drives (except server grade SATA drives and RAID array units (like mentioned above) only run at around 150mbps. So a USB hotswappable hard drive is a good backup unit.
The problem I have with these issues, is that Western Digital (the one company I have experiance with) only warenties these backup drives for 1 year. They also DONT seem to be built for regular usage... Just Backups.
My solution to you, is cut the crap... dont buy more useless software that can or cant work, and invest yourself in a true USB Add On (not Backup) hard drive.
This would be much easier then finding hot-swappable SATA or ATA devices, because like I said these cards are for servers, and generally RAID devices that cost more then the USB drives do.