Re: External SATA (E-SATA) hot pluggabability?

Previously Anna <myname@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"BDD" <bdd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:hTu%h.23395$Bk.14837@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi. So I've heard E-SATA is hot pluggable but its not working on my
setup. I have a fairly popular ASUS motherboard (ASUS P5-B Deluxe).

I have an External SATA HDD connected right now through the E-SATA
connector on the back of the mobo with a 500GB Western Digital SATA. The
device works fine and gives good performance but Windows Vista shows no
options for disconnecting the drive through that "Safely Remove Hardware"
tray icon. From all appearances, I might as well have plugged this thing
into an internal SATA connector!

Incidentally, my USB connected drives all connect/disconnect (usually).
That is one of the reasons why I want to switch to E-SATA. Not only for
better efficiency but USB has been proving to be unreliable at times where
it fails to recognize the USB drive forcing me to repeatedly physically
disconnect and reconnect the drive's USB cable until it finally works.
Grrr. :( Anybody else get this at times?

I've gone through all the BIOS options I know but haven't come across
anything I recognize that allows/disallows E-SATA hot plugability. Can
anyone point me in the right direction as to how to get this thing to
work? Is this a BIOS setting, OS setting or both?

Relevant System specs:

ASUS P5B-Deluxe mobo (Intel P965 chipset) (BIOS version 1004)
Intel Core 2 Duo E-6400
4096 MB DDR2-800 RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition


BDD:
Your WD SATA HDD with a SATA-II interface (3.0 Gb/s) has "hot-pluggable"
(a/k/a "hot-swappable") capability. Ditto your ASUS board with the eSATA
port.

Ordinarily with connected "hot-pluggable" SATA HDDs connected the system
will not display the "Safely Remove Icon" in the Notification Area (the
systray). It's simply not needed in the case of a SATA-II device supported
by the motherboard as it is in your system.

That is patently untrue! If you unplug a device unsafely, the write
buffer may not have been commited to it and data loss and disk
corruption is quite possible!

The real reason is that there is no way to tell insoftware whether an
SATA device is external and hence Microsoft may them all as
internal by default. My XP installation classifies them all
as removable, even my internal disk, which is the sensible thing to do.

Now with *some* motherboards with some NVIDIA chipsets (and possibly other
chipsets) the SRI *will* appear in the Notification Area. When it does it's
entirely superfluous and need not be activated-accessed in any way with
respect to a SATA-II "hot-pluggable" HDD.

Absolutely not. You have to remove the disk safely (giving the OS the
time to flush its buffers) for a safe unplug.

In any event you can connect & disconnect your WD SATA HDD in the identical
fashion as you would, for example, using a USB external HDD. (I'm assuming
of course that the SATA HDD is employed as a secondary HDD in the system).

That is true and you absolutely have to "safely remove" and USB HDD
before unplugging it, since otherwise you can get the cited data-loss
and filesystem corruption.

Usually no data will be bufferd for devices recognized as removable,
hence buffers are allways written through. This may still take time,
depending on the amount of data to be written. If you unplug during
these writes, you will loose data. However if you allways wait until
the data has been written, you do not loose data on an unannounced
(to the OS) unplug. If that is what you are doing, you likely have
been lucky so far.

And don't cite me SATA as hot-pluggable. While true, it concerns the
electrical connection and not the data-buffering by the OS!

For devices not recognized as removable, disk buffering is more
extensive and data can stay in the buffers (an not yet on disk)
longer. The traditional upper limit before a forced flush to disk
is 5 minutes. I don't know what Microsoft uses.

Arno
.

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