eSATA drives: Requires import and remains in disk manager after undocking

[pushpull]

Hi guys,

I have offline data stored on SATA drives which I randomly connect to my server using an eSATA dockingstation. I'm having a couple of annoying issues which hopefully is possible to tweak to make the docking/undocking smoother. Ideally I would like to be able to just dock the disk and have it ready right away the way it works on most of my external USB harddrives.

Relevant setup:
Windows Home Server 2011, SATA drives (mostly dynamic disks), eSATA docking bay.

Problems:
1) Once I dock a harddrive with a partition & data I need to rescan disks in Disk Management, waaaaaaait, then the inserted HDD appear as foreign & requires import, even though I've used the disk on box earlier. I would like to avoid this manual operation to be able to dock a HDD in my homeserver then access shares on it directly without having to RDP into the box and perform the steps above.

2) Undocked disks remain listed in Disk Management as 'failed', even after a reboot. I have a list of 10+ "failed" disks which all disks I've docked & connected on eSATA at some point. It makes a mess.

Appreciate all input

 

[drtweak]

Yea i have had these issues too mainly with my workstation i use at work. I've noticed if i used my Dell SAS 5 Raid card I have less issues like these. But sometimes on the onboard SATA it will take like FOREVER for it to read the hard drive. And then if i just remove it without removing it properly (Task bar icon for removable devices and remove it) It will take FOREVER before the drive goes away but it will eventually.

This has been at random for me and at first this wasn't an issue but has gotten worse over the past few months.

I would try using USB (I don't have issues when i use USB on the same exact drives with the same exact dock) and see if you still have the issues. If you don't then it could just be the SATA controller lagging or something with windows itself that is taking forever to read drives.