ESata dock not recognized in PC

[dlfelder]

Hello,

Been searching the web for a day trying to solve this one. Hopefully one of you folks here who are smarter than me (as most of you probably are) can take a minute to suggest a solution.

I just bought a Blacx sata/USB docking station that says it's sata1 & sata 2 compatible. I also bought a Seagate 1TB 7200RPM drive that Amazon says is "Sata 3".

My motherboard is an ASUS IPIBL-LB in an HP desktop, the spec says it works with drives that "Support Sata 1.0 and Sata 2.0 Specifications."

Bottom line: the dock & drive don't work on my PC, either with an eSata cable (tried 3 different cables on 3 different ports) or with the USB 2.0 cable. (tried 2 different cables)

We put the dock & drive on a friend's PC and they both worked. We tried my drive in his dock and my dock on his PC with one of his drive and my new drive. Everything works, which eliminates a problem with the drive or dock.

He gave me an old 80GB Seagate sata drive to test on my PC, and it was recognized in the dock, so I know my sata connection works. I don't know what Sata specification it is, but being several years old and 80BG tells us it's probably not Sata 3.0.

I've read many posts here saying something along the line that "Sata-3 is backwards compatible." Is there anything else you can think of that I'm missing in my setup? Or maybe not ALL sata 3 drives in sata 1/2 ports are not ALL backwards compatible?

There's already an internal 1TB sata drive in my PC, so I know it's not a question of the BIOS not supporting the drive size.

PC is an HP 6267c, Win 7 home (64), 8GB, 300 GB system drive & 1TB media drive.

 

[sminlal]

There can be issues with the autonegotiation of the SATA protocol when you're using different generations of SATA devices and ports. Most disk drives have a jumper that forces them to the slower SATA speed (i.e., SATA-II instead of SATA-III) in order to circumnavigate these issues. If your drive has such a jumper it would be worth giving it a try.

 

[WyomingKnott]

The PC ports that you are connecting this device to: Are they true eSATA ports or SATA ports with a physical connection adapter?

eSATA and SATA signalling specifications are different, although they do overlap. So if the dock has a true eSATA connection and you connect it to an SATA port, it may work or may not, depending on - wait for it - which particular piece of hardware you are using.

EDIT - in re sminlal. Can you try these drives connected directly to the motherboard, eliminating the eSATA part of the connection? If you still have the exact same pattern, sminlal's solution gives you a good chance. If the issue goes away, then I'll place my money on improper mixing of specifications.

 

[dlfelder]

Best answer selected by dlfelder.

 

[dlfelder]

There's a jumper block that allows you to restrict the drive to 1.5 GB/sec, which did the trick. Thanks!

So, does that mean the answer is that my motherboard only supports up to sata 2 speeds?

 

[sminlal]

> So, does that mean the answer is that my motherboard only supports up to sata 2 speeds?

No, it just means that the SATA chipset on your motherboard and the SATA chipset in the drive don't play together as well as they should. Fortunately no hard drive really needs speeds in excess of 1.5Gbit/sec anyway, so it shouldn't hurt your performance.