Is it safe to add (plug in) or remove (unplug) any device while Windows is in sleep (a.k.a. standby, a.k.a. suspend) mode? What type of devices can be added or removed in this manner? Can you do this with all type of devices like internal PATA/SATA hard drives, PATA/SATA optical disk drives, NIC (network) cards, sound cards, and AGP/PCI-Express video cards, a.k.a. graphics cards? Do they need to support any particular technology like hot plugging?
I know there are hard drives that are specified to support hotplugging. So what would happen if you tried to use a regular hard drive in the same way?
Are there network cards, sound cards, graphics cards, or any other type of PCI-Express cards that explicitly support hotplugging? I have never seen anything like it. It's usually internal hard drives that are designed for RAID arrays that are explicitly specified to support hot plugging.
Best Answer
In general, unless the design allows for it you should not add/remove printed circuit cards while there is power to the backplane. You might get away with it 9 times and get unlucky the 10th and burn out the card, due to the order that the circuit board pins made contact.
And this of course says nothing about what happens to the logical state of the OS.
USB, et al, is a different matter.