eSATA HD Not Recognised When Connected: BIOS Config Needed?

simplesimon · 6 Jul 2009 at 11:06

I have a Sata-II Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB HD in an IcyDock USB2/eSATA MB559US-1S external caddy. The drive was commissioned and installed externally on an XP Home SP3 PC, via the caddy USB cable. This works as expected and whenever I connect the drive to the PC via the USB cable, it auto-recognises as drive L.

Now I want to use the eSATA interface for increased backup speed. My PC is about 3 years old and it's mobo (MSI K8N Neo4 MS-7125 v1) only has SATA-1 connectors - all the info I can find suggests this shouldn't be a problem and just means that the data transfer speed will be reduced to approx.150Mbps (peak).

However, after fitting the eSATA port which came with the IcyDock and linking it to SATA connector 2 on the mobo (connector 1 is used by the internal WD drive), I find that when I plug in the external HD via the eSATA cable, no auto-detect takes place and the disk isn’t visible to Explorer or Device Manager. But if I scan for hardware changes, it finds the drive, Explorer immediately recognises it as drive L and I can use it as normal. Unfortunately, when I reboot and check Device Manager, it has forgotten about the Samsung drive and when I reconnect, nothing happens until I do another rescan. To complicate matters, when the drive has been recognised after a re-scan, although it appears to work as normal, it doesn't appear in the 'Safely Remove Hardware' tool so I can’t dismount it – this doesn't inspire confidence! When I use the USB cable auto-recognition works just fine and I can use the drive as normal – so, I guess the question is “what’s going wrong?”

Since I haven’t got much experience of eSATA drive config, I was wondering if I need to define anything in my [Phoenix] BIOS? Currently, under the ‘Integrated Peripherals, IDE Dev Config’ option, SATA is enabled for all connectors and under the ‘SATA Dev Config’ option, RAID is disabled – I assume that I don’t need RAID drivers and configuration just to connect an external NTFS-formatted SATA-II drive? Also, the drive isn’t included in the BIOS IDE config options which currently only list the internal HD (IDE Third Master) and my optical drives (IDE Secondary Master and Slave) – does the external HD need to be auto-configured here, first before it can be auto-recognised by Windows?

BTW, I am aware that, in rare cases, SATA-I mobo connectors don’t play nicely with SATA-II drives but I always thought this caused the drive to lock-up until you reconfigured it to run at 150Mbps (Samsung do mention this and provide a s/w patch) – in this case, the drive appears to work fine in eSATA mode once Device Manager can see it.

Thanks. All thoughts and help very gratefully accepted.

siege2 · 6 Jul 2009 at 11:39

well on my my previuos m/b asus p5e it only had 6 internal sata connectors, so I bought 2 pci express esata cards, one adaptec other unbranded make and used them to connect H/D's externally, just giving u my thoughts regarding your post.

miniyazz · 6 Jul 2009 at 12:33

It sounds like you haven't got AHCI enabled in BIOS, but if that were the case, I'm surprised it detects the drive at all without a reboot, so not 100%..
If it is due to no AHCI, you may have to make a registry change, depending on whether the eSATA port is on the same controller as your OS drive. AHCI is controller dependent, so you would need to enable it for the eSATA controller; it allows plug & play.
If you change the OS drive controller to AHCI without making the registry change first, it will not boot.
It will only show up safely remove hardware if the drive is recognised as an external drive. You should go to the device properties and disable write caching, then you can unplug it safely when it's finished copying.

simplesimon · 6 Jul 2009 at 22:17

Hhmm, I'm probably being dumb but I thought AHCI only applied to SATA-II. My PC is about 3.5 years old and only does SATA-I. I've checked the BIOS and there is no reference to AHCI.

re your other point, how can I tell which controller the eSATA port is on? Since I didn't change the BIOS settings in any way when I added the eSATA connector, do I have to change something there, as well? Like I said, my current position is that, without a Device Manager rescan, I can't see any reference to SATA at all!

All thoughts appreciated.

miniyazz · 6 Jul 2009 at 23:35

AFAIK it is for SATA and therefore either I or II, but I could be wrong. If the eSATA controller is built into the motherboard, you will need to google the motherboard to find out the controller.. although if there's no reference to AHCI in BIOS, it might be irrelevant. On some controllers, RAID mode encompasses AHCI, so there might not be an actual mention of AHCI.
If you have eSATA via an expansion card, the controller will be on the expansion card and probably already set to AHCI.. you will need to go into the specific BIOS of the expansion card to check.

siege2 · 7 Jul 2009 at 00:27

found this on a google search;

As for the BIOS settings... I don't believe the nForce 4 chipset supported AHCI, so it would have to be running in PATA compatibility ("IDE") mode. I checked the manuals for that model, both revisions listed on MSI's website, and don't see anything mentioning the setting.

also found a chart and this line has a cross

Serial ATA AHCI compatible

iam off to bed now gnight all

on main PC right now , will browse tommorow on my Asus eeepc 16gb ssd 2 gb memory etc :-)

simplesimon · 7 Jul 2009 at 09:53

Just to be really confusing, the mobo seems to comes in two versions and two variants! If you take a look at the MSI site, you will see manuals for the Platinum and non-Platinum versions. You will also see that each of those comes as a v1 or v3. As far as I can see, the v1 provides SATA-I connectors and the v3 provides SATA-II connectors. The non-Platinum variant appears to be provisioned with 4xSATA connectors whilst the Platinum one has 8xSATA connectors. I've got the non-Platinum v1 mobo i.e. 4xSATA-I

As Siege2 says, the mobo manual doesn't mention AHCI anywhere and I don't think it's supported for my mobo/BIOS.....so, does that mean my SATA-II HD in a caddy (connected through the IcyDock 'eSATA port on a bracket' accessory) will only be recognised if I boot the PC with it connected and powered on?

Thanks for all the feedback guys. After doing a lot of reading around, I see an awful lot of people are having similar problems with all sorts of varrying eSATA kit - it really feels like the early days of USB when you never knew whether a USB device would work or not and, even if it did, it might not on another PC

locrieth · 7 Jul 2009 at 10:54

I have the same icy docking station and the exact same problem not detecting on esata but fine on usb. ive got an old p4 with an intel D865Glc board. it did recognise the drive once so i way like yay \o/ then i rebooted and it never found it again after that

siege2 · 8 Jul 2009 at 18:11

it may help if you get esata card either pci or pciexpress 1 card
I have an adaptec and a unbranded one that works 100 % the time
yep 8 onboard sata's or not anoth for me !