Is eSATA compatible on every SATA Mobo

sup toms...

i have a sata->esata bracket like THIS:




can every motherboard that has sata connectors be converted to esata using that?

I believe you have to have AHCI enabled as well. I have a p35ds3l that supports AHCI, but have never been able to get it to work properly.

Technically you don't need AHCI, but if you don't have it enabled then you need to turn off the PC to plug or unplug the drive, which could get you in trouble.

Ive actually been able to get a process down to "safely" remove a drive even if its not marked as hot swappable. Ive done this with Win2000 and XP both with eSATA and IDE drive, if you enter the device manager and remote the hard drive in question and it deletes ok you can then remote the drive. Unplug the power first, this will spin the drive down and park the head as not to damage it then remote the data cable. Havent tried plugging drives back in like this but i think its safe to assume IDE probably wont work plugging back in as it will need to be detected again in the BIOS.

Im currently using an eSATA like this as i dont have AHCI enabled in the BIOS, which means XP doesnt mark the disk as "removable", and since i installed XP without the AHCI driver, if i enabled it now it would boot.

its a File server, so i dont want the files to become unavailable. Unlimitely i think ill look at installing the AHCI drivers to resolve it but yeh.