Asus A8N32 Deluxe and External Sata Issues

[jdobratz]

I have the above motherboard and I am having a problem connecting an external SATA drive to the SATA port on the rear of the motherboard. I purchased this drive and this external enclosure from newegg. When I first received the items from newegg I noticed that the external motherboard connection was not a standard L shaped SATA connection. So I did some research and found out it is an eSATA connector. I found this cable online and purchased it. Now, when I connect the enclosure with this cable, windows does nothing, it does not see the device in any way. Did I miss something along the way? Is there some incompatability that I did not see? Ive checked the BIOS and it doesnt seem that I have disabled the rear SATA port in the BIOS. The drive works fine if I hook it up via the USB connection on the enclosure. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[grooge]

And what your manual said about external sata? Some board need a wire from one sata connector to the rear port.

 

[lopri]

The eSATA on ASUS board connects through Silicon Image chip (Sil 3132, I believe). In the BIOS, look for something that says "Sillicon Image" or "SiL RAID Configuration" something like that. You should have an option to choose either 1) Disable, 2) RAID, 3) SATA2. You should choose "SATA2" in order to use the external SATA drive.

 

[jdobratz]

I have checked the BIOS, it is definitely set to SATA2. I have narrowed down the problem to either be the Silicon Image controller on the motherboard, or the SATA to eSATA cable that is mentioned in the OP. The drive works fine when it is connected to one of the SATA ports that is powered by the nForce4 chipset (this uses a standard SATA cable, one with the L shaped connector on each end). One odd thing that I have noticed is that in device manager, the nForce SATA controllers are listed under the IDE Controller section, whereas the Silicon Image controller is listed in the SCSI and RAID controllers section as 'Silicon Image SiI SATALink Controller'. Could it be that Windows is not seeing the controller properly and sees it as a RAID controller and not just a standard SATA controller? Would someone else with this board be able to verify in device manager if there is supposed to be an entry for the Silicon Image controller in the IDE Controller section? Many thanks for the help.

 

[grooge]

external non native controller are always listed in the SCSI device. SATA drives are IDE drives. SATA controller are IDE controller. only the interface is different ..SATA instead of PATA.

If you use something like deamon tools, to mount CD and DVD image on virtual drives, the controller will be listed in SCSI/RAID too..