vivek

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hi

i have a problem with my eSATA setup, i am not getting the option to "Safely remove hardware" for hotswaping. my motherboard is Asus p5kc with jmicron controller for eSATA. have enabled AHCI for Jmicron in bios, loaded the Jmicron drivers, tried under vista & XP both still when i connect my external HDD (Kingwin enclosure) to eSATA it is not recognized as hotswapable device.

please help me hw to configure eSATA.
 

Paperdoc

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I saw something in the Microsoft Knowledge Base about a failure in VISTA to recognized an eSATA device as hot-swapable, etc. Search there with keywords eSATA or hot swap. They have a temporary (i.e., not fully tested and proven) hot fix.

That said, I'm not sure whether it is necessary for the "Safely Remove ..." thing to be functioning. I believed that ALL true eSATA controllers support hot swapping. That means that they never hold transactions in buffers for processing later - they always complete the write operations to leave the HDD's files in a stable closed state. Hence it is always safe to disconnect an eSATA drive as ling as it is not in the middle of an operation.

HOWEVER I cannot find any confirmation of my belief above in the safety of hot-swapping eSATA drives. So I could be wrong! I do know that NOT all SATA controllers do this, but I understood that one of the distinguishing features of eSATA over plain SATA was this feature.
 

SomeJoe7777

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For an eSATA interface to support hot swap through the Safely Remove Hardware option, the eSATA controller driver must specifically support the hot-swap feature. Some drivers do not support it.
 

vivek

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thank you for your replies.

the problem is still not resolved. the primary controller on my mobo is Intel ICH9 which does not support AHCI/eSATA. the eSATA/IDE pata option is provided by by a third party controller called Jmicron which may be the reason for missing feature.

as for Paperdoc's comment well i could not connect my eSATA HDD while the system was on, vista would just freeze.

i had read some posts where in it is possible to enable AHCI on the primary controller ICH9 by editing the intel chipset driver to accept ICH9 as AHCI capable which according to the post intel deliberately hid the option and limited this offering to only highend boards using ICH9r controller otherwise technically similar chips with only raid being additional.
 

Paperdoc

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Check out this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/206783-32-sata-swap

Look particularly at posts from 07-03-2008 onwards from SomeJoe7777. He has had good expereience with a 3rd party driver he found.

I don't think the Intel board's primary controller is invovled here, although I could be wrong. The eSATA controller by JMicron is supposed to be doing it all. However, as the reference postings say, somethmes the drivers provided by the mobo manufacturers for use with Windows fail to do the job properly.
 

vivek

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hey thatz a interesting topic but as with all other eSATA discussions it ends with no real solution, i had read similar articles on eSATA before and I knew about the third party drivers but what i actually wanted is to somehow getting windows to accept it natively as it would on a Intel ICH9R chipsets and knowing eSATA Jmicron chipset is not a reliable option I have switched over to my primary controller and have put aside my longing to use it as hotswappable until my next upgrade and hopefully everything works out of the box then.