Originally posted by: Einz
I recently purchased an external hard drive with an eSATA plug, and after reading up on it, I'm a bit confused. My mobo only has internal SATA plugs, no eSATA plugs. Can I simply buy SATA to eSATA cable (like
here), plug in the SATA end into my mobo and the eSATA end into the hard drive and it should work? Will thsi support hot swapping like the USB interface does? Sorry for the idiot questions, my google and wikipedia skills are failing me. Thanks all!
Your link is broken.
Here are the exact steps I took to get my eSATA drives hotswappable. Originally I couldn't get the drives to show up unless they were on when I booted up. I couldn't swap drives without rebooting either. Vista thought they were internal drives. The key was to have AHCI enabled in my bios.
1) Read
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 and follow those instructions if you installed Vista w/o AHCI enabled like I did. If you have XP, look for instructions.
2) Enable AHCI on your drive controllers in your BIOS.
3) Make sure you have the RAID driver software installed for your mobo!!! I couldn't get this thing working until I did this. I don't use RAID so I didn't install these originally.
4) Profit. My eSATA drives are now hotswappable. I can turn them on/off whenever I want. I get the "safely remove hardware" icon for all my eSATA drives, just like with USB drives, where I didn't before.
Notes:
My mobo came with an esata bracket with two ports. I plugged those cables into the sata ports on my mobo. I then plug my eSATA drives to the bracket. I also use
this which came with an eSATA bracket which I didn't need.
Make sure your mobo/raid controller supports Hotswapping. I heard some INTEL controllers do not, even if you follow all my steps correctly, you're just SOL.
My mobo has 2 raid controllers, Intel and Gigabyte (JMicron?). The Intel controller has 6 sata ports, Gigabyte has 2. I enabled AHCI on both controllers in my bios. I also installed raid drivers for both from my original mobo cd.
I have my eSATA drives hooked up to the 2 Gigabyte ports. I haven't tried them with the Intel ones.
If you can't get the above to work, try this out
http://mysite.verizon.net/kaakoon/hotswap/index_enu.htm
Edit:
Basically, if you mobo supports sata, you can use eSATA no probs. Hotswapping depends on your particular RAID controller.