eSATA external drive not recoginized

[Capt Haywire]

I installed Win 7 64 on my ASRock 890gx pro3 with SATA mode set to AHCI. The external eSATA drive will not show up until I scan for new hardware. Everything works fine until I shut down and then the computer hangs. If I boot with Thermaltake MAX 4 drive on, then it will show up but again hangs at shutdown. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[profJim]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

Can you boot with your e-sata drive turned off and then power up the external drive after win7 is at the desktop?
Before shutting down, can you use win7 to "safely eject" your external drive, and then shut down?

This might be a bios issue, are you using the most recent motherboard bios?
My P35 Intel system has no problem with an external Rosewill e-sata enclosure with a 2GB hdd.

[Capt Haywire]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

I don't have the option to eject the drive. I think flashing the BIOS sounds like a good next step so will try that tonight. I will post my results.

On a previous Asus build I installed a Jmicron driver and that worked great, it seems that this board will require something else.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[profJim]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

Let us know how you make out.
Good Luck.

[Capt Haywire]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

I installed BIOS 1.30 and still have the same results. Should I try setting BIOS to RAID? Clearly something is still missing.

It may be time to jump to USB 3.0, just really don't want to abandon 2 eSATA enclosures if possible.

Thanks for help.

[profJim]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

Post your your question to ASRock > Support Request Form
Send a private message to ASRock TSD - Emily and include a link to this thread.
Use both approaches.

[Donthuis]

Re: eSATA external drive not recoginized

I possess the 890FX Deluxe 5 and noticed that the HDD connected via e-SATA is only recognised after a very long time (6,5 minutes to be precise) and if I leave it on when starting or restarting windows (XP32 in my case) this startup proces also takes a very long time to complete. So better to start up without e-SATA active and let the system find it later on. On this MB, the eSATA port is covered by the Marvell chip and driver and in Device manager there is a tab and box to tick to activate safe disconnection of HDD's. And so I use the safe disconnection facility on my e-SATA disk before entering hibernate/sleep. Maybe in your case a similar tab/box can be found in the relevant device details?

My earlier Asrock Alive Dual e-SATA2 MB is much better for e-SATA, hotplug reconnection in just a few seconds after I switch the power on for the case, there's no interference with Windows startup in powered up situations. I feel present e-SATA solutions from ASRock are inferior to earlier configurations. A pity! I too possess an e-SATA case I want to keep on using. But maybe with everything moving to USB3.0 or the new Intel standard, interest in e-SATA is waning :-(

PS The clocked time of 6,5 minutes suggests a MS timer period, because it resembles the 6-7 minutes it takes Windows to recognise all PC's in the same home network, if they've been unvisible for one reason or another. Maybe the earlier e-SATA chipsets had inbuilt polling or interrupt facilities, not needing Windows or the user to find and activate the drive.

I found from watching the active background programmes, that indeed the USB3.0 ports are actively monitored and if the XFast USB utility is installed, this programme is also active in the background. So, e-SATA is not monitored while USB 3.0 is?! Then it is clear which of the two connection options is much easier to use for external HDD's

So I bought myself a 2 Tb USB 3.0 drive from Verbatim and after changing its FAT32 filesystem to NTFS, I put lots and lots of backup files on it and had to switch it off and on many times over the day. Everything goes quickly after the first recognition by XFast USB-facility. Definitely much better than the e-SATA disk that worked so fine on Alive Dual eSATA2!

UPDATE 16/2 Even with a later Marvel chip driver update I found on the Web than provided by ASRock the hotplug e-SATA on AHCI was NOT improved, so I said goodbye to e-SATA on this ASRock board. I bought a cheap extra HDD enclosure with USB3 and moved my 1 Tb drive to this case. Note: while the Verbatim case performs on USB3 at SATA read speed level, the cheaper case only reaches half of this value. Apparently USB3 technolgy is not yet standardised. Because of backup usage this is not critical. But it would've been better if eSATA worked properly in the first place :-(