Howard, At the level of the 1394 cable they are very hot swappable. You can unmount the drive, plug a different one in, and then remount it. Nothing automates this very well today, other than using labeled partitions on the drive itself and setting up your fstab file appropriately. I use fat32, ext2, ext3 and reiserfs all under Linux at the same time. At the level of the drive inside the Firewire enclosure, that would be based on the hard ware you purchase. Hope this help, Mark