Prerequisite: Hardware Must Support Hot Swap

First confirm your drive backplane/controller and platform support hot swap. This is the basic requirement.

BIOS Settings You Need

Using ASUS as an example:

1. Press F2 or DEL during boot to enter BIOS.
2. Switch to Advanced Mode.
3. Go to Advanced -> PCH Storage Configuration, find the target SATA port, and set Hot Plug to Enabled.
4. Press F10 to save and exit.

After this, hot-swap should be available. Other motherboard brands provide similar options.

Operating-System Steps

Windows

1. Stop I/O activity on the target drive.
2. In Device Manager, find the drive and choose to uninstall/eject the device.
   
3. After successful removal, physically unplug the drive.

Linux

1. Stop I/O activity on the target drive.
2. Unmount the file system (for example umount /dev/sda).
3. If using LVM, deactivate the volume group (for example vgchange -an).
4. Put the disk into standby (for example sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sda).
5. Remove the device from the OS (echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/block/sda/device/delete). After this command, verify the disk has fully stopped spinning before unplugging power/data. Pulling a still-spinning HDD can damage the head/platter assembly.
6. Once the above steps are completed, unplug the drive.