What the heck is with AMD's SB950? No hotswap?

[VirtualLarry]

I plugged a HD into my Rosewill Blackhawk's top-mounted HD dock. It is connected to a SATA port on the motherboard, and to power.

Unlike when I had my Gigabyte P35/ICH9R motherboard in there, I didn't get a pop-up from Windows indicating that my disk had been inserted.

Yes, I have AHCI enabled in the UEFI BIOS on my ASrock 990FX Extreme4 board.

Yes, I installed Win7 HP 64-bit with AHCI enabled.

The drive finally showed up, after I went into Device Manager, clicked on Disks, and clicked "Detect New Hardware".

Switching to "View devices by connection", I can now see something that disturbs me.

It lists both a "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller", and a "Standard Dual-Channel PCI IDE Controller"
Under the first, it lists "ATA Channel 0-3", and under 0, it lists my OCZ Agility 30GB SSD.
Under the second, it lists "ATA Channel 0-1", and under "ATA Channel 0", it lists my Seagate 1TB HD.

So why aren't all of the board's native AMD 6Gbit/sec SATA ports listed as SATA/AHCI controllers in Device Manager? Why are two of them showing up as ATA/IDE ports?

Obviously, that's why I'm not getting the AHCI hot-swap for that drive.

Is there a fix for this? I would prefer to use MS's drivers, not ATI's.

The Seagate in the HD dock does NOT show up under "Safely Remove Hardware". Thus making use of the dock problematic. (I guess I have to plug it into SATA port 4, and not 5?)

Edit: Figured it out. It's the mysterious "SATA IDE Combined" Mode setting. If you it to ENABLED, SATA ports 5 and 6, are addressed as a standard IDE port. (Good for DVD drives, perhaps?)
If you DISABLE that setting, all six SATA ports show up under the AHCI controller.

However, I'm puzzled, that neither the OCZ in port 0, nor the Seagate in port 5, show up under "Safely remove hardware".

With my Q9300 rig with the P35/ICH9R, they did, when I had them plugged into the Intel controller ports, and AHCI was enabled in BIOS.

So why isn't the MS built-in driver supporting Hotplug for the AMD SATA ports?

Edit: Found this page:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...rs-please-look-in-and-particiapte-in-the-POLL
It has a link to AMD's AHCI drivers, I'm going to try them.

Edit: Tried the AMD drivers, still no "Safely remove hardware".

I'm guessing that perhaps it's a BIOS bug/limitation, and they need to add that feature to the UEFI bios, to enable Hotswap on the ports, like the Intel boards seem to. Perhaps that's a feature of the AHCI 1.2 standard.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Since there is no "Safely Remove Hardware" with either the MSAHCI.SYS or the AMD AHCI driver, I had to resort to using this tool:
http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

 

[Elixer]

I'm guessing that perhaps it's a BIOS bug/limitation, and they need to add that feature to the UEFI bios, to enable Hotswap on the ports, like the Intel boards seem to. Perhaps that's a feature of the AHCI 1.2 standard.

This is controlled by the BIOS, if they don't tell the OS about it, then the OS can't show that option. There should be a place in the BIOS that enables this, if not, then contact your mobo maker and complain loudly, there is zero reason for that feature not to be enabled.