Re: External SATA (E-SATA) hot pluggabability?
- From: BDD <bdd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 23:34:18 -0700
Anna wrote:
"BDD" <bdd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:hTu%h.23395$Bk.14837@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHi. 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.
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.
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).
There is, however, one somewhat annoying feature which I'm nearly (not absolutely) sure applies to your ASUS motherboard. If you connect your SATA HDD *after* the system boots, the system will not detect that drive. You will need to access Device Manager, right-click on "Disk drives" and select "Scan for hardware changes" from the submenu. The drive will then be recognized and listed - and more importantly, usable.
Anna
Hi Anna. Thanks for the tip. After double checking that no applications were using this drive, I unplugged the eSATA cable. Vista didn't even notice it was disconnected. The drive letter still shows up in Windows Explorer and it still reports a drive exists!
I too have encounter the issue where an external USB drive does *not* show up in the "Remove Hardware" tray icon. But the USB drives are always hot swappable though because I plug in the drive *after* booting Vista. As Arno commented, I would rather have drives appear in the Remove Hardware tray because, when disconnecting, the OS will flush write buffers and ensure that no processes have open files.
.
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