PCI Addon Card for eSATA

[Doc]

I was given a Fantom 1TB external drive as a present which I can easily use with USB 2.0. The drive also allows connection with SATA so I decided to purchase an addon card from NewEgg.

The card did not work in XP or Ubuntu 8.04 though it was seen on boot by the BIOS. It only worked with XP on the initial install. Updating the drivers had no affect.

I am wondering what to do next. I can get a different card that does not have the Silicon Image chipset 3512. There are one or two that use a VIA chipset or I can get one that uses a different Silicon Image chipset. I am limited as my motherboard only has standard PCI slots.

I do have an empty SATA connection on my AsRock motherboard which I could probably use by hooking up an external port.

Are there any suggestions as to what card I should use or whether I should connect to the motherboard?

Thanks for any suggestions

Doc

[Steve R Jones]

Approx how many gigs of data will you send back n forth from the drive each day..

Did you look for PCI cards that had a eSATA port?

[Doc]

Thanks Steve for getting back to me.

I expect to send only about 1-2 GB on this drive back and forth if that much.

The card I had bought did have an eSata port and supported SATA I only. While SATA II would be nice I do not need that kind of speed or spend more money than I need to.

As an FYI my motherboard supports SATA I (1.5GB/s) also which is why I am thinking now of maybe just buying a bracket to connect to my internal SATA.

Doc

[jdc2000]

After looking at the available adapters on NewEgg, I did not see any that I thought were worth purchasing, even the expensive ones. You might be able to find one that would work with some additional research. However, once the cost goes into the $50-$75 range and up, and new motherboard would be a better choice.

[dneilson]

Except for the labor of course.

[SuperSparks]

You won't find any real-world difference in speed between SATA1 and SATA2 unless you are using a whole bunch of drives simultaneously. I'd go for the bracket myself.

[jdc2000]

The only issue you might face with the bracket is hot swapping. You may find that you have to shut down and power off the computer before removing the connection to the external drive.

[Doc]

In researching the bracket someone posted that as the external drive they had connected was not originally "hot swappable" they had to change the properties of the drive. Sadly they did not state whether they did this in the BIOS or through the OS.

Doc

[Steve R Jones]

Why not just stick with the USB connection and be done with it

[SpywareDr]

In researching the bracket someone posted that as the external drive they had connected was not originally "hot swappable" they had to change the properties of the drive. Sadly they did not state whether they did this in the BIOS or through the OS.

Doc

Wikipedia > Serial ATA (SATA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esata

Hotplug

All SATA devices support hotplugging. However, proper hotplug support requires the device be running in its native command mode not via IDE emulation, which requires AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). Some of the earliest SATA host adapters were not capable of this and furthermore some older operating systems, such as Windows XP, do not directly support AHCI.

As their standard interface, modern SATA controllers use the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), allowing advanced features of SATA such as hotplug and native command queuing (NCQ). If AHCI is not enabled by the motherboard and chipset, SATA controllers typically operate in "IDE emulation" mode which does not allow features of devices to be accessed if the ATA/IDE standard does not support them.

Windows device drivers that are labeled as SATA are usually running in IDE emulation mode unless they explicitly state that they are AHCI mode or in RAID mode. While the drivers included with Windows XP do not support AHCI, AHCI has been implemented by proprietary device drivers.[5] Windows Vista,[6] Windows 7, FreeBSD, Linux with kernel version 2.6.19 onward,[7] as well as Solaris and OpenSolaris have native support for AHCI.

[SuperSparks]

Hot plugging isn't ll it's cracked up to be anyway, at least not in Windows. I have AHCI enabled on my rigs, but if I connect a drive while Windows is up and running it won't mount the thing until I do a reboot