Officially you should have a 1000$ controller to do this, but i never saw a controller who could not do this. The only damage i have seen with hotswaping has been a wasted psu bicause the person who did the switch couldnt manage to put the cable straight in the plug.
potato# atacontrol list
ATA channel 0:
Master: ad0 <QUANTUM FIREBALL_TM3840A/A6B.2400> ATA/ATAPI rev 0
Slave: no device present
ATA channel 1:
Master: no device present
Slave: no device present
potato# atacontrol detach 1
(here i wend out and mounted a 15 gig IBM harddrive in the server)
potato# atacontrol attach 1
Master: ad2 <IBM-DJNA-351520/J56OA30K> ATA/ATAPI rev 4
Slave: no device present
And as you saw it detected the harddisk, now just partition and format it.