Is hot-swapping safe for all ports on a Mac?

I think any port on current Macs are considered hot-swappable.

However, I am personally more paranoid about FireWire ports, because I +blew one out+ on a Power Mac G5. It was the front port, so I often swapped my old iPod, video camera, and other FireWire devices on-the-fly on that port. One time, it did not work. Fortunately, fixed under AppleCare. Since then, I seem to notice more reports about FireWire ports failing (much more than similar failures for USB ports).

My precaution on my iMac is to use a self-powered FireWire hub for anything that I connect and disconnect often. I use the direct port for an external drive that I keep connected almost all the time. If I do need to connect and disconnect it, I power off the iMac. If it was a MacBook, I would probably use sleep when I connected or disconnected a FireWire device.

Both USB and FireWire ports are hot swappable. So for devices like printers and scanners you can just connect and disconnect them anytime. However for devices that mount a volume on your desktop (ipods, flash drives, hard drives etc..) you always need to eject/un-mount the device before disconnecting it. Hot swappable just means that you do not have to power down or reboot your computer for it to communicate with the device.

George

Anything is possible but that should not normally happen. The only way that would happen that I can think of would be either a short caused by damage to the connector like a bent pin or severed cable. It's possible that the device or port on the computer can malfunction and cause damage to other devices connected to it. But again this should not be a normal occurrence.

You can also connect and disconnect the audio output jack without restarting and this is not even considered a hot swap because the audio data only goes one way. The system does not know or even care if there are external speakers connected or not.

George