I have a NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G Pro PCIe card installed in my machine and am connecting a Sans Digital TR8M hard drive enclosure to it.
First off. I know that the Enclosure requires a card that supports a port multiplier and I know that the card I have does not support port multipliers. (so that would be my guess at a solution to my problem). But I am still curious as to why I am seeing what I am seeing.
When I boot my system all 8 drives show up in the BIOS boot log as online or their status ok. The enclosure lights up for each of the drives and as soon as Windows 7 boots it drops down to just two lights and only reads 2 of the drives. (I believe the enclosure has two ports with 4 drives on each port -- hence the port multiplier as I understand it.)
Upon further investigation I do find what appears to be all the drives (or at least a controller for each drive) showing up in the device manager.
Another thing I experienced is I had the drive set up in FreeNAS (abandoned that for now since my computer isn't fast enough) and I was able to see all the drives and even format them into a RAIDZ2.
Is it simply that there aren't Windows Drivers for the card that make it function in the manner I am attempting? Should I abandon trying to figure it out and just get a new card? Really curious as to what the answer might be.
First off. I know that the Enclosure requires a card that supports a port multiplier and I know that the card I have does not support port multipliers. (so that would be my guess at a solution to my problem). But I am still curious as to why I am seeing what I am seeing.
When I boot my system all 8 drives show up in the BIOS boot log as online or their status ok. The enclosure lights up for each of the drives and as soon as Windows 7 boots it drops down to just two lights and only reads 2 of the drives. (I believe the enclosure has two ports with 4 drives on each port -- hence the port multiplier as I understand it.)
Upon further investigation I do find what appears to be all the drives (or at least a controller for each drive) showing up in the device manager.
Another thing I experienced is I had the drive set up in FreeNAS (abandoned that for now since my computer isn't fast enough) and I was able to see all the drives and even format them into a RAIDZ2.
Is it simply that there aren't Windows Drivers for the card that make it function in the manner I am attempting? Should I abandon trying to figure it out and just get a new card? Really curious as to what the answer might be.