ESATA hot plug

[maxxim]

I have external eSATA hard drive which i want to hot-plug into my computer. I enabled AHCI in the BIOS and installed AHCI driver. My motherboard manual says that I need to power down external hard drive before connecting it to eSATA. When I turn the power off, connect eSATA and power back on, Windows does not detect hard drive. But when I connect it with power on it detects it right away. I do not keep external drive on all the time and it is annoying that i need to unplug and plug back in every time I want to write something on it. Also I don't want to damage hard drive buy plugging it in with power on. What am I doing wrong?

 

[Lavarin]

What are you PC's specs? As a standard, eSATA is currently not very widely supported. Or at least not supported enough to enable plug-and-play functionality.

 

[wuzy]

I do not keep external drive on all the time and it is annoying that i need to unplug and plug back in every time I want to write something on it. Also I don't want to damage hard drive buy plugging it in with power on. What am I doing wrong?

That's just how the way hot-plugging with eSATA and AHCI works. The HDD has to be powered on before being plugged in. You will not damage the HDD that way.