eSATA drive dissapearing

[Sierry]

Wondering if anyone can help me here. I've recently bought an eSATA cable for my western digital mybook home 500GB drive. I've updated the firmware on the western digital drive and got the latest jmicron JMB36X driver (mobo is an abit IP35 pro XE) from their site but for some reason when the drive goes into sleep or spins down it will spin back up when accessed and then disappear from the system after a minute or so. The only way to get it back is to power cycle the device.

I've done some reading up and this appears to be a common issue with eSATA on win7 x64 machines. Has anyone figured out a solution for this or anyone got any ideas to try?

Hope I've posted this in the right section.

Cheers for any thoughts and replies.

 

[Sierry]

Sorry to answer my own question here but I think I've found the solution so I thought I'd post it for anyone else with JMicron controller issues.

You'll need to go into your BIOS and set the controller to be IDE and not AHCI or RAID. It's a bit slower, yes, but at least it'll work!

Then go into windows and go to your device manager. Find the jmicron controller and uninstall and select to remove the driver as well. Reboot your machine and make sure you're not connected to the internet so Windows 7 can't search for the latest driver. Once rebooted your machine should detect the hardware and then go into device manager again and check that your device has been detected. It should now be listed under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and will be the Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller. If you still see the JMicron controller then you need to remove the driver again (this will happen if you've installed over old versions.)

This driver seems to be stable whereas the JMicron one isn't so until they release a newer version to fix all the esata issues i'd recommend sticking with this one.