PowerEdge T310 - Upgrade for SAS 6 to 6Gbps & RAID 5?

Assuming this is the SAS 6/iR and not the actual SAS 6 HBA (because it does not support RAID), it ONLY supports RAID 0 and RAID 1. It is a limitation of a very low-end card. If you can swing it, I would recommend you get a PERC 6/i, which is a high-performance controller and can do RAID 5 (although I would strongly recommend a RAID 10 or RAID 6 instead of RAID 5).

Also, I'm a little confused as to how to hot swap drives. Is there a utility I need to install to quiet the drive bus before removing it? If so, does this utility work with both SATA and SAS drives?

No utility is required ... drives can simply be removed/inserted at any point, HOWEVER;

• Best practices would call for you to use the "prepare to remove", "replace", or "force offline" options from OpenManage before removing when you are doing it on purpose. (I don't believe these are options on a SAS 6.)
• Know the limitations of your RAID level and don't put unnecessary strain on the array by removing drives willy nilly, or you risk data loss, as most RAID levels (RAID 5 especially) are at risk of data loss with an offline drive.

All SATA and SAS disks are hot-swappable, and the SAS 6 is a 3Gbps controller with no write cache (H700 is 6Gbps with 512MB or 1024MB write cache).