ESata plug differences: E6500 vs. E6400 vs. E4300

I wanted to share with the forum some strange, yet interesting findings that I've come up with in the last week or so.

First, some background. I am the IT manager/senior admin for my company. I do all of the purchasing and high end tech stuff, so I get to play with a fair amount of hardware and equipment before deploying it to the company.

For the last year or so, I've owned an E4300 as my work laptop, and have been purchasing E6400's to deploy to our company. Some of our consultants have dual internal hard drives using the Newmodeus optical bay caddy, and use an esata/usb combo port to power their optical devices when they need. We also utilize the Coolmax esata/usb enclosures for external drives. All of these devices work great on our older E6400's and my E4300.

Recently, I made another order of some E6400's and 2 E6500's as a trial. No matter what I do, the Newmodeus cables (I have a hard drive one as well) will NOT work with the E6500 and 1 of our new E6400s. Occasionally, by wiggling the cable in the plug and pushing hard, I can get a device to be detected for a few seconds. I decided to have Dell come out and replace the motherboard in 1 to see if I got a defective board.

Well, that didn't help at all, so I dug a little deeper. I borrowed a colleagues Coolmax enclosure, and plugged that in. To my amazement, it worked fine. I compared the esata cables....and the Coolmax cable is ~1-2mm longer than the Newmodeus cables.

The port depth on some of these machines must be a little deeper than others, not allowing the cable to fully seat and get a good connection. I have 2 E6500's and 1 E6400 with this issue.

My next plan of attack is to use a small saw to cut a little of the plastic off the Newmodeus cables to see if I can get them to seat a little deeper. I will report back my findings. I never thought something so simple would be such a PITA.

 

I've got some eSATA HDDs which connect OK with both the E6400 and E6300. I can't comment on the E6500.

John

 

yea, it seems to be very hit and miss, I just wanted to post my findings should someone else encounter the same issues, and this might pop up should they do a search.

 

Anyone have a source of decent/cheap 2.5" hdd enclosures that work with the powered esata port yet? (ie one cable, no extra USB cable to get power)

 

check the pinned thread at the top of the forum. Go back 7-8 pages, there were a few suggestions and URL's there.

 

I've got three of these. This gets round the problem of enclosures that have a powered eSATA port being hard to find.

John

 

Or if you're looking for a supporting enclosure (not just a cable): http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=349325

 

I had to cut a bit off the cable for it to go deep enough in my WD MyBook Home edition for it to connect properly, i ended up cutting both sides and it slides further into the laptop now as well. Very possible that a slight change makes a large difference here. The cble also falls out very easily, but that's also because the cable is flat and very stiff so it doesn't give when the laptop is moved.

 

I ended up trimming a cable, and it still doesn't work on the different devices that don't work on my E6500. This sucks. I simple move the plug over to my E4300, and bam it works. Guess I'll get back on the phone with Dell and see what the hell is going on.