Talking of eSATA....

ChrisLX200

ChrisLX200

ChrisLX200

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... just what do you have to do to get a working eSATA connection?

I've had this 1TB WD MyBook for near 12months and *never* got it to connect on either of 3 computers using eSATA. Connects using USB and FireWire no problem.

I just built the rig listed below, so out of curiosity thought I'd have another go. New hardware and all, figured it might work. The new PC was not setup using AHCI but I soon fixed that, plugged the drive in and... the inevitable blue screen. Tried booting with/without it powered up. Won't boot up with it plugged in (at least it's not ignoring it).

I looked for updated WD firmware months ago without luck, and my cable was neatly trimmed then also so I know it gets 'deep' enough. It really shouldn't be this difficult...
 
I even bought an eSATA Express Card to see if it would work with the laptop. No chance. I bought an eSATA add-on card for my old Asus A8V. Still no chance. I was really hoping to use it for full drive image backups of several hundred GIG each but USB is too slow for me. If I knew the issue was with the MyBook I'd get a different eSATA caddy and another drive. It's pretty old technology now, there shouldn't be these problems.
 
My Asus motherboard came with 2 eSATA connectors, of which both worked fine but the naff controller controlling them caused my sound to "jitter" when a HDD was connected.

I disabled that controller and bought a £8 PCI-E 1x sata controller using a silicon 3132 chipset, that lets me use either 2x esata ports on the card, or the two "internal" connectors on it, or one of the internals and one of the externals. Both my external hard drives have worked fine using esata.
 
I know i'm not using the same mobo, but my experience with my 'my book' has been very good.

The thing i found was that the esata ports on the mobo's i/o back plate are usually on an auxillary controller which detects the drives during POST, else it just turns off.
I found plugging in my drive before powering up allowed the controller to detect the drive and it works perfectly. Although this obviously isn't ideal as the idea of e-sata is to be able to hot swap the fast data connection.

Luckily my case has a esata port on its front i/o panel which is plugged into one of the normal sata ports on the northbridge/mobo, allocate this port as NB->esata in the bios and works perfectly:)

Plug my drive in as i would a USB device, and 2-3 seconds later up pops the drive in explorer. (although audio stutters + system hangs for this short time!)

possible solution: buy a sata(male) to esata(female) cable and plug it into one of the normal sata ports, then have a look in the bios for the esata flagging and should resolve the issue?
 
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I bought a Seagate Freeagent 1TB a few months ago and the eSATA connection sucks. Big file transfers cause the drive to seize up and transfer speeds can be abysmal. I would connect it up via USB, but the safety remove hardware icon bugs me.
 
A few times I have seen eSATA be shared with one of the internal ports so you could only use one at the time, but that only explains a few of them problems.

I got a card, not sure where from, which you connect an internal port to, and your PSU, and on the outside you have a SATA port (not eSATA) and a molex connector, best solution really imo, can plug in external enclosures and bare drives you need to test.

Unless you want to use a "long" cable for some reason (one of the reasons for esata appraently), though this is still pretty short compared to firewire/usb
 
I have a Sharkoon SATA Quickport Pro on an A8N32-SLI DLX which is great on the whole, but it definitely seems to not like having the eSATA cable hot plugged or running without the USB plugged in as well.
 
You have to do a fresh install with AHCI set up first. I had no end of problems trying to get eSata working on 2 boards until I did this and hey presto
 
Typical. I was just bitching about eSATA connections to my missus and said 'watch this...', plugging the MyBook in and waiting for the inevitable BlueScreen. Nothing. 'Well Vista has probably just ignored it then' sez me, opening up explorer and... there it is, listed as proudly as you like and fully accessible. 'What's wrong with that then, shouldn't it be there?' she says. You just can't win.
 
I've got one of them.

Works perfectly over FW800/400/USB2 and eSATA using my MBP/10.5.5

Although the connection on my 500Gb WD eSATA thing is ****, keeps falling out. eSATA is a appalling design. :(

Although they all max out my HDs, inc a 74Gb Raptor, so im happy *shrug*
 
should this be possible.

i dont have a esata port on motherboard so got myself a sata to esata cable came straight from motherboard sata to dock but could never get it to recognise hdd always thought it was wrong so only used usb.

cheers.
 
starfighter said:
eSata is pointless, if it could carry the power I would see the point. Oh yeah and if it worked... LOL
Click to expand...

eSATAp does indeed carry power, since it's a hybrid of the original eSATA interface and USB.

I've never tried using it simply because I've never had a device to use it with, although my machines have the ports available. With regards to the BSODs, have you considered trying using the ports off something like a bootable Linux disc, in order to identify if the problem potentially lies with hardware or with Windows?
 
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