Esata External Drive Questions...

[Snacko]

Ok, my WD 500gig MyBook External Drive took a crap on me last week. It found a ton of bad sectors and could not move or repair them. And I could not format it, and my system would loose the device every few minutes. I used that drive with Firewire400, and I just plugged it in the port and used it. I had completely forgot about UnMounting it before I unplugged it, so I would just pull the Firewire plug when I was done. I am starting to wonder if this may have been a cause of all the bad sectors? Anyhow, I don't want to do that again..

So, I bought a LaCie d2 quadra 1T External drive the other day. (Great drive for the price BTW. Heavy aluminum block case and all the port connections you could want!) I have it plugged into an eSATA port on the back of my MB. The manual says to UnMount it using the 'Safely Remove Hardware' applet in the System Tray. However, this drive does not appear in the list. The manual clearly says that even for eSATA, I should use 'Safely Remove Hardware' before unplugging it.

Does Windows look at eSATA as a device that needs to be UnMounted? I thought eSATA was different and was looked at as an external system harddrive and maybe it doesn't fall into that category? I'm trying to figure out why it is not in the list to Safely Remove??

My plan to use this is to turn it on, manually do my backups, and turn it off. This way if I get a virus or something the backup drive cannot be affected since it is off. Yesterday, I flipped the power switch on the back of the drive and turned it off. The lights went off, and I could still access the drive for about 30 seconds after it was powered down!? Does the eSATA cable provide power? How could I still access this drive if it is powered off? Now, I am wondering if I even need to pull the cable as well as powering it off..

[DD_Brando]

Ok, my WD 500gig MyBook External Drive took a crap on me last week. It found a ton of bad sectors and could not move or repair them. And I could not format it, and my system would loose the device every few minutes. I used that drive with Firewire400, and I just plugged it in the port and used it. I had completely forgot about UnMounting it before I unplugged it, so I would just pull the Firewire plug when I was done. I am starting to wonder if this may have been a cause of all the bad sectors? Anyhow, I don't want to do that again..

So, I bought a LaCie d2 quadra 1T External drive the other day. (Great drive for the price BTW. Heavy aluminum block case and all the port connections you could want!) I have it plugged into an eSATA port on the back of my MB. The manual says to UnMount it using the 'Safely Remove Hardware' applet in the System Tray. However, this drive does not appear in the list. The manual clearly says that even for eSATA, I should use 'Safely Remove Hardware' before unplugging it.

Does Windows look at eSATA as a device that needs to be UnMounted? I thought eSATA was different and was looked at as an external system harddrive and maybe it doesn't fall into that category? I'm trying to figure out why it is not in the list to Safely Remove??

My plan to use this is to turn it on, manually do my backups, and turn it off. This way if I get a virus or something the backup drive cannot be affected since it is off. Yesterday, I flipped the power switch on the back of the drive and turned it off. The lights went off, and I could still access the drive for about 30 seconds after it was powered down!? Does the eSATA cable provide power? How could I still access this drive if it is powered off? Now, I am wondering if I even need to pull the cable as well as powering it off..

Do you have your eSata port enabled in BIOS? I know that mine is actually disabled currently, on my Asus (AMD) Crosshair 3 board. I think I need to enable AHCI to use it, instead of legacy IDE.

B

[Snacko]

Yes, it's enabled, and the drive works. It just does not show up in the 'Safely Remove Hardware' applet in the SystemTray.

I finally got a response to my Support Ticket at LaCie. They say that SATA and eSATA will not show up in the Safely Remove Hardware applet. Even though their manual clearly says to use it when hotswapping an eSATA drive. Hence the confusion.

I think my only choices to shut this drive down is to Shutdown my computer, or go to the Device Manager and disable/enable the drive every time. Or, don't use eSATA?

[B16Enk]

There is an option to turn off drive write caching, and you may be able to enable 'Optimize for quick removal':

Open Device Manager, expand 'Disk drives', right click your eSATA drive and you should see this:

Disable Write caching as a minimum on this drive, and if possible enable the top option.

As it says on the tin, so to speak, this negates the need to 'Safely Remove'

[Snacko]

I have this for that drive:

When I try to uncheck the first option it gives an error saying I cannot do that for this drive.

I finally got a reply from a LaCie support person who may know what they are talking about. The first two had absolutly no clue and were just making things up. Their replies were actually funny for how stupid they were.

This support guy said that I need to set my SATA confi to AHCI in my MB Bios. It was currently set to PCI I think. But setting it to that caused Windows not to load, so I set it back. I need to do some reading about this option. I am not sure if I can change this after I have installed Windows..... Argg..

So far, I just found this:

AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) enables native command queuing and hot-plugging through SATA

host controllers (Serial-ATA) for your hard drives. In many scenarios it enables more efficient multi-tasking. Vista was the first Windows OS to support AHCI out of the box, where as Windows 7 does the same. But an issue with AHCI is that if you install the OS without enabling AHCI in the BIOS, enabling it after installation will render your OS unusable. This is because Windows disable the AHCI driver since it is not needed during the installation.

There does appear to be a workaround, but it's probably not worth it....

[DD_Brando]

I have this for that drive:

When I try to uncheck the first option it gives an error saying I cannot do that for this drive.

I finally got a reply from a LaCie support person who may know what they are talking about. The first two had absolutly no clue and were just making things up. Their replies were actually funny for how stupid they were.

This support guy said that I need to set my SATA confi to AHCI in my MB Bios. It was currently set to PCI I think. But setting it to that caused Windows not to load, so I set it back. I need to do some reading about this option. I am not sure if I can change this after I have installed Windows..... Argg..

So far, I just found this:

AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) enables native command queuing and hot-plugging through SATA

host controllers (Serial-ATA) for your hard drives. In many scenarios it enables more efficient multi-tasking. Vista was the first Windows OS to support AHCI out of the box, where as Windows 7 does the same. But an issue with AHCI is that if you install the OS without enabling AHCI in the BIOS, enabling it after installation will render your OS unusable. This is because Windows disable the AHCI driver since it is not needed during the installation.

There does appear to be a workaround, but it's probably not worth it....

Straight from the horse's mouth

[Snacko]

Thanks Brando. I'm going to think about this one for a while. I don't think it is worth changing this just so I can hotswap one external drive. I can alway use Firewire if I want to do that I guess. I have also read some stories about changing this to AHCI and it slowing down some computers. I think it will make all SATA drives have the Eject option, and I read one story where this guy's daughter would always select Eject from the right-click menu to eject a cd out of the SATA CD drive. Ouch... Anyhow, thanks for the replies...