Gigabyte Ga-p965-ds3

[Oblivion121]

I have a gigabyte board, as stated in the title, and I have an Esata external hard drive from my other board and I wanted to know if i have to have an esata port on my new board to use this hdd or can i just plug it into an internal port on my board?

 

[mcurphy]

bump, because I'm curious as well.

 

[StopSign]

There is no eSATA on the DS3.

 

[Bozo Galora]

no, you need the PCI host controller
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_ext_esata.pdf

 

[Oblivion121]

Yes, I know there is no esata on my board, but Couldnt I just run a cable to the ports on the motherboard instead of buying the card to do that. What exactly is the difference of esata and internal sata ports?

 

[yiranhu]

try it and see what it does... if the computer see it then great!

 

[mcurphy]

Originally posted by: Oblivion121
Yes, I know there is no esata on my board, but Couldnt I just run a cable to the ports on the motherboard instead of buying the card to do that. What exactly is the difference of esata and internal sata ports?

I've been researching the options on this and it appears as though you don't neccessarily need an eSATA card to hook your enclosure up. I do, however, think you need at least one of those brackets that fit into the back of your case to convert the eSATA connection to regular SATA on your board. I don't think the cable's for eSATA and regular SATA have the same connectors, but I could be wrong on that.

If you choose to go with the bracket, then more than likely you will not be able to hotswap the drive and will need to shutdown the pc to connect / disconnect the drive. This also seems like it wouldn't be true eSATA, as your board is just recognizing the drive as an internal SATA drive.

If using a PCI card, another forum member also suggested reading into different BIOS ptions and compatibility issues, and that the card won't guaranteee true eSATA. I haven't looked into these compatability issues myself yet.

Here's a link to a thread in the General Hardware section that has some more info, maybe it will help more with your question:

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And here's a link to a thread I started looking for suggestions, but also has some useful info from posts by Zepper:

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After reading all of that, I still do not have a definite answer on everything myself. It seems to be pretty confusing for something that should be simple, of course I got frustrated and didn't continue researching the options.

I think I'll probably just take the dive and just buy the PCI card and enclosure and see what happens, lol. If it doesn't work like I want it to, then I'll be forced to read more and make it work.

Wish I had bought the Asus P5B with eSATA built in, lol