Port Multiplying

[enterflux]

Hey guys. I've looked around and have yet to find a consistent answer. I bought a dual bay eSATA external drive dock for storing my design and photography externally. I know it says that my motherboard must support port multiplying, and as far as I can tell, it does, but Windows only recognizes the first drive in the device.

My motherboard is an MSI 860gxm-g65. (Official Product Page)

When I say that I think it supports port multiplying, I'm going by my drive readout in my BIOS and the POST list, as it will identify both drives without problem. I think I may be incorrect in believing that I have the correct SATA driver installed on Windows as I have my hard drives to run in AHCI mode, but Windows will not treat them as hot-swappable.

Basically what I'm asking is:
How can I tell for sure if my motherboard supports port multiplying, and if it does, what am I doing wrong that is causing me to not access both drives? Thanks a bunch!

 

[tomatthe]

Maybe someone else will look this up for you, but my suggestion would be to contact MSI and ask them. No one is going to know the answer to this off hand, and it's a bit annoying to basically do the leg work for someone who is to lazy to do it themselves.

 

[enterflux]

Ouch. Sorry for being "to lazy..." I've just done a fair amount of searching and had no idea how to figure it out. I just was wondering if there was some diagnostic hardware or something that could tell me, but I guess I'll just do what you suggested and contact MSI.

 

[enterflux]

Just in case anyone else might be having a problem and is "to lazy," my motherboard has the AMD SB850 southbridge and, accoring to MSI, does NOT support port multiplying. In my case, I'm just going to have to drop $35 on a PCI-e SATA III card to use both of the dock ports.