Peter Rabbitson wrote:

Apologies for yet another off-topic thread :)

controllers that fully support hotplug. By fully support I mean I can 
pull a drive, have udev register it as missing, put it back in - have 
the device node re-appear in /dev. To date I am not aware of any 
consumer grade (i.e. can be found on newegg) controller/chipset which 
can actually do this. Does such a card exist?

Thanks

Everything intel since ich7, as well as, SIIs JMicron, Promises supports 
hotplug out of the box in modern linux (generally -  most of the 
hardware working under ahci driver in your linux).