You sure your gamepad doesn't have a piggyback connector on the ADB plug? Some did.

I've hot-swapped SCSI drives without crashing the OS, sort of...

• Unmount from desktop (with SCSIProbe etc)
  
• Pull power connector from drive
  
• Let spin down
  
• THEN pull SCSI connector.

To mount a drive, do all steps in reverse.

NB, never tried this under OS X or on a SCSI card.