Esata Won't Work

[Kent10]

Hi:

I am having problems getting esata to work. I just bought an external enclosure and 750 GB hard drive. I formatted the drive. After starting up my computer I can turn the external drive on using esata and it works but when I turn it off it doesn’t seem to completely disconnect. If I try turning it on again it does not work and if I shut down the computer it hangs. I am in AHCI mode. I read the following:

“make sure you have your ESata connected & turned on b/4 booting, and don't turn it off until the computer is off. Otherwise, you need to use remove hardware before disconnecting. ESata is NOT hot swappable in XP.”

Is this true about XP? I was hoping to use esata like USB to turn the drive on and off whenever I needed it. I tried removing the drive in device manager to shut it down but that did not work.

Thanks, Kent

[screwballl]

eSATA IS hot swappable (to an extent) in XP. I do it several times a week with my system, I have a 500GB WD 3.5" drive in a eSATA enclosure. It shows up as a removable drive (just like my USB thumb drives do) and I use the icon in the bottom right to disconnect device, then turn the power off.
Granted it is not TRUE hot swap because of the issues you describe. I found for me it works best if the internal SATA connector is plugged into a RAID port instead of a regular plain SATA port.

[polobunny]

I have no problem hot swapping my eSATA hard drive in my Windows XP and never had any. The easiest way is to go to Remove hardware icon, stop it. Then disconnect the drive eSATA then power it down using the switch. If you power it down before disconnecting the switch sometimes it will freeze for a few seconds. Then when you are ready to use it again, turn it on, wait a few seconds for the drive to initialize then plug it in your eSATA.

[screwballl]

after you shut it off.. and then turn it back on, many times you have to go into the diskmgmt.msc and activate/reactivate that disk. It sounds like it is seeing it as a regular hard drive and not a hot swappable removable drive... also why I mentioned using a RAID port instead of regular port on the mobo.
I had this same issue on my Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P until I moved it to a RAID port (regular ones are orangish-yellow, RAID ports are purple on my board)

[Hitman]

A picture is worth a Thousand words. The ports Mike is referring to are the ones on the upper right of the board.



To clear up any confusion he is talking about plugging the eSATA ports that come on the brackets pictured on the left.

[screwballl]

right... from the purple RAID port to the bracket itself.. but I assumed that was already setup that way if the drive is already recognized...

[Hitman]

Assumption makes an Ass out of U and Mption.

[screwballl]

don't go gangsta on us now Joe

[Kent10]

Thank you all very much for your help. I got esata to work by plugging it into the raid (purple) port as you suggested screwball. In fact it works perfectly just like USB and I don't even have to "stop" it. When it was attached to the regular Sata port I don't get any remove hardware icon. I get an Intel Matrix Storage Manager icon and that is it.

After all of this, I have decided to use the USB port instead. The reason is because while using the purple RAID port and with AHCI enabled my start up time is 11 seconds slower. I start up much more than I use my external drive and so a fast start up is more important to me. And besides this new drive with external enclosure is still much faster than my older external using firewire so I am not too unhappy.

Thanks again for helping me to figure this out. You guys are great.

[stinger608]

Your mother board doesn't have an ESata port on the back I/O ports?

The reason that I ask, is, that would be the ideal way to "hot swap" is with the built in ESata port, if the motherboard has it installed that is.