[medic617]

I recently built a new pc. The motherboard is an Asus Striker II Extreme and it has 2 onboard eSATA ports. Do these ports require drivers? Either way how do I use them? I recently bought an external eSATA/USB hard drive enclousre but could not get the eSATA part to work, the USB worked fine. Any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

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It seems that these ports are plug and play. I looked into the bios and there is no special setting for this.
I downloaded the manual from this link and downloaded e3746. at the end of page 2-30 it talks a bit about the eSata. Are you trying to run RAID?
Does your external drive have its own power connection?
When you connect it do you get any recognizing of new hardware from the windows?

[vally]

It seems that these ports are plug and play. I looked into the bios and there is no special setting for this.
I downloaded the manual from this link and downloaded e3746. at the end of page 2-30 it talks a bit about the eSata. Are you trying to run RAID?
Does your external drive have its own power connection?
When you connect it do you get any recognizing of new hardware from the windows?

[medic617]

No RAID. The enclosure has it own AC power supply. The pc recongnizes the drive if the USB cable is used but the drive is not recongnized if the eSATA is used.

[medic617]

The motherboard supports AHCI, is it necessary to enable it in the BIOS for the eSATA ports to work? The manual refers to "hot swapping" in relation to AHCI. If AHCI is needed do I need to reinstall the OS (Win XP Pro SP3)?

[vally]

I researched this a bit. It seems you need to change the settings in the bios from sata to ahci but if you do only this then you will get a bsod (Blue Screen Of Death ) You need the driver so that windows will know how to handle it.
Here is a link Where some one explains how to handle it.

Tell me what happened

[Titan8990]

eSATA should not need any kind of drivers. As far as your computer knows the drive is internal. All eSATA does is convert an external SATA connector to an internal SATA connector.

Are you using a an eSATA bracket on some kind of onboard? If it is onboard then just switch to bracket.


Edit: Also eSATA is not always "hot swappable" meaning it needs to be plugged in when you computer boots up.

Edited by Titan8990, 24 July 2008 - 11:59 AM.

[vally]

medic617
Did you get the external drive to run via the external eSata?

[medic617]

By enabling AHCI I was able to get the computer to recognize the drive when it was booting but Windows would not show it. I have been able to do some research and found that eSATA doesn't seem to always work reliably and it seems like more of a hassel right now than anything. I was one of those functions on my MOBO that I wanted to figure. If there are any more suggestions I will take, otherwise thanks for the help.

[Titan8990]

Are you using the bracket or onboard?