Anyone try esata on 5796?

I have never had luck with esata on any computer I own, but I figured finally with my spanking new 5796 that it would work, but no

Here is what I have tried:

Seagate 750 and a Acomdata Puredrive 750
2 different cables
Bios is perfect, versions are correct on both computers

The drives work fine as USB
NO luck whatsoever as esata drives

Also, my desktop, which also has native esata support in a windows XP environment (P5N1-sli) also will not see either brand of external esata drive.

Anyone know of an esata issue with Sager? Or what on earth I could be doing wrong?

Something must be going on, too, because after plugging in the drive to the esata port, and if I try to shut down, Vista hangs and will not shut or restart. Nor will the Sager boot with an external attached.

I am about to give up on esata forever, two machines with mobo support do not see two different brands of drive and two brand new cables were tried. AAAAAARGH.

 

try this. this is what I do with my desktop although I haven't tried eSATA with the notebook yet. When you log in. Turn on your eSATA drive and wait. if nothing happens, ie it doesn't register, go into the device manager, click on a plus icon on any device (this is to bring up the scan for devices button) than click on the scan for devices button that comes up on the top tab. Mine is always recognized and then loads the drive. See if that works. I'll try on the notebook soon. I'm running out of outlets lol. time to bring my power bar.

 

No luck. I don't know why I have the touch of death when it comes to esata.
scan for changes just hangs, and even though I can type in Firefox at the moment, exporer is toast and I am going to have to hard reboot...again.

as far as I have read online, it is the Intel ACHI SATA controller which is supposed to pick up the drive, reloaded bios. When I go there to check for attached devices it completely crashed Vista, ctrl-alt-del even failed. This was using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. Kills vista.

Gotta reboot after posting this.

 

For my desktop, I have to reboot the machine in order for it to recognize the e-sata drive. Have you tried that?

 

Don't take this the wrong way, but are you supplying power to the drives? Esata does not supply power for the drives where as USB does, so Esata requires a power supply as well. Just an FYI in case you were unawares since you did not mention checking power connections anywhere in your posts.

PS: Some external drive cases can use a USB connection as a power connection while using Esata for data transfer.

 

You aren't the only one. I have a tower with native esata on the mobo and a new 5796. I have tried both Acomdata and Western Digital externals, with 3 different cables, XP (on tower) and Vista 64 (on the 5796). NEVER got it to work on either. I am stuck with USB for now, unless someone knows a solution.

I also researched the esata intel drivers on both boxes, all drivers are spanking new, no luck. So that is 2 OS, 2 different computers with native esata, 3 different cables and 2 different external drive manufacturers. All were tried in all different combinations, meh.

 

I use it on mine with a western digital drive at first it worked fine was getting about 50mb's for transfer speed..

Now it is very finicky, but I think my issue is hte cable, bought it from a local store and it is very ridged cable with not much flex and they only had a short when, so i bent it so the drive was lined up with the side of the laptop, and i think the cable just sucks..So i will be ordering a new one online that has good ratings.

 

My 5796 eSata works perfect, I get different degrees of performance
with the drives I have but all of them, except one WD work perfect. I have
one WD that likes to be a royal pain in my .... well you get the idea.

I even have XP on a slimline 320 WD320BEKT and it boots right from it on eSata once I set the BIOS correctly.

I have noticed that the cheapie eSata cables products suppy don't work very well.