eSATA addition

[bonanza]

I am looking into P5E motherboard (chipset X38 + ICH9R). But this board doesn't have eSATA, and I am planning to provide it when I already purchase it.

I know there is a rear bracket that extends internal SATA to eSATA. But how to make such "eSATA" become hot-swappable (as onboard eSATA) ??

Thank you in advance.

 

[Crashman]

That's a great question! Hot plugging is a feature of AHCI and it's supported by the chipset, the only problem is I don't know of any way to force the hard drive to dump its cache to platters. With nVidia chipsets, you can click the "safely remove hardware" icon in the system tray, but Intel doesn't support that. I looked in system properties, and "optimize for quick removal" is also greyed out.

What's worse, most ESATA controllers have the same problem. So go ahead and use the bracket, you'll have no worse problem than you would with "native" eSATA.

 

[bonanza]

Thank you all.

I read this from wikipedia :
The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communicate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices such as host bus adapters which are designed to offer features not offered by Parallel ATA (PATA) controllers besides higher speeds, such as hot-plugging and native command queuing. The specification details a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors in order to transfer data between system memory and the device. The current version of the specification is, as of July 2007, v1.2.

Has anybody ever tried to install AHCI driver and try the "eSATA" hot-plugging ?

 

[Crashman]

Thank you all.

I read this from wikipedia :
The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communicate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices such as host bus adapters which are designed to offer features not offered by Parallel ATA (PATA) controllers besides higher speeds, such as hot-plugging and native command queuing. The specification details a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors in order to transfer data between system memory and the device. The current version of the specification is, as of July 2007, v1.2.

Has anybody ever tried to install AHCI driver and try the "eSATA" hot-plugging ?

Yes, it works but you can lose all the data that's in the CACHE. I corrupted a couple files that way.

 

[1haplo]

The ICY DOCK MB664US-1S comes with a rear bracket for eSATA.

1Haplo