e-sata bracket and Asus P5Q Pro

[geek101]

Hi all,

I thought if I connect the sata cable from the bracket to SATA_E1 port on the board e-sata should work fine.
There is no documentation from Asus regarding on how to connect the bracket. Did I get this right?, because I used the e-sata port to connect to an external hard drive but looks like the drive is not getting recognized. This could be cause this external drive is crap?.

I did got the BIOS and changed the EZ backup to normal so that I can use the SATA_E1 as
a normal SATA port. This should make the e-sata work normally right?.

If someone owns this board I would like to hear from them.

 

[tenax]

not sure we have the same model of p5q, but i do have 2 drives operating as esata with a brackets with no issues.

a few questions/observations

when you say esata1 i assume you're talking about one of the 2 special sata ports for raid (on my board, there is an orange one, that would be esata1 i believe and a white one. the rest are a red i believe to distinguish between them all.the orange and white ones are the 2 that work in conjunction with ez backup as follows:

raid 0, raid 1 or the orange one as a normal port (i have not been able to figure out how to get the white one detected as a normal one)

it's not true that the raid is a driverless function. when a person installs the drivers from cd or website for the motherboard, it actually does install a driver that you see as part of the bootup.

i don't know why it wouldn't, but i would avoid using an esata connected drive on either the orange or white ports if you can. it simply may not be compatible.can you avoid doing that?

are you sure you have power going to your esata drive? either you will have a molo adaptor on the bracket so you can connect it to a moly on your power supply, or you're bracket will have it's own power connector mounted on it which in turn will connect to a moly or an sata power connector in your case to your power supply, or it will have it's own external power supply that you plug into a conventional outlet.

letting us know your model of board might help..fyi, in my system, i have 2 250 gig hard drives in my case on orange and white ports in a raid 1 configuration using ez backup working fine, then i have 2 esata drives mounted to regular channels, then 1 usb hard drive.

 

[Binky]

I think he's talking about an eSATA bracket attached to a regular SATA port on the MB. In my experience, this has been hit or miss depending on the chipset. Intel chipsets have been the most problematic for me. I did a bit of research and found various opinons about whether the Intel chipsets support this type of bracket. Some said yes, some said no. Since mine just refused to work no matter what, I believed the latter. I have had success on various SIS and AMD chipsets, just not intel chipsets.

If you want true eSATA and the MB doesn't have a real port on the back, you need a PCIe card. I'm sure people will disagree with me.

Edit: i just noticed that the MB specs do show an included "1 x e SATA / 1394 bracket." I also see that there are orange and white SATA connectors for the Sil5723 chip with the rest of the SATA ports coming from the ICH10R. The Sil5723 specs do not show support for hot swapping, so I'd try one of the intel (ICH10R) SATA ports.

 

[tenax]

i think you and i mean the same thing, but i can see where i might not have been clear..what i'm saying is it sounds like he has connected an esata add on bracket, to one of the special ports for mounting an ez backup array. and if that's the case, i'm saying i would not connect an esata bracket to one of those 2 ports..rather to the regular ones. in terms of how well they work? i've used esata brackets on 2 boards from 2 manufacturers (p35 and now p45 chipset) and never a problem on either. on my current board, i'm using an abit bracket on an asus board..and a 3rd party bracket as well on the same board. transfer rates are good, drive never drops out.

 

[geek101]

Binky and Tenax,

I actually tried ICH10R port and it was taking long time at boot time for SATA port IDE detection. I returned the external e-sata drive back to the store. I will try again using the ICH10R port for e-sata with another device and see how it goes.

thanks for both of you for letting me know e-sata works with ICH10R, otherwise I have to invest in a PCI card again .

 

[bonanza]

Originally posted by: tenax
..................i've used esata brackets on 2 boards from 2 manufacturers (p35 and now p45 chipset) and never a problem on either. on my current board, i'm using an abit bracket on an asus board..and a 3rd party bracket as well on the same board. transfer rates are good, drive never drops out.

Does your eSata (via bracket) support hot-plug ? have you tried it ?