eSATA on back of mobos

[Cairo777]

Hey all,

I just hooked up an HD using eSATA on the back of my eVGA 680i. The motherboard has in its BIOS a setting where you can assign a certain SATA slot as eSATA. What exactly does that do? I have not noticed any difference whether I turn that feature on or off.

Also just a quick question to those currently using eSATA... does the HD enclosure containing the HD turn off the HD by itself when for instance my computer is off? Or do i manually have to turn the power button off on the enclosure? Do I need to somehow disconnect the drive within windows when I am not using it? I am a bit confused. I am just using the eSATA as a normal drive... it's always on no matter.

Is there software I am supposed to install?

thanks!

 

[jkresh]

There shouldnt be software to install.

If you want to turn the drive off while the pc is on then you should go to "Safetly disconnect hardware" and have that shut the drive down before turning it off/unplugging it so it finishes writing whatever is in the chache and you dont loose/corupt data.
The drive probably stays on when your pc is off, so you coudl turn it off or not (if its idle then it doesnt take much power (maybe 1-2watts) so its up to you).

As to which sata port in the bios, I cant be sure since I dont have that board but I suspect that whichever sata slot is assigned to estata wont work i fyou connect a drive to it internaly ie lets say the board has 6 sata and 1 esata, it might be that the controller has 6 sata and thats it, so it has to disable one of the internal sata ports so it can run the esata one (again I could be wrong).