eSATA Not Working With RAID Enclosure

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grush

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I have an Alienware Aurora ALX a few years old with a Core i7 (first gen). Recently I got a 4-bay RAID enclosure and ordered three 3TB drives. I just received the second drive today. The eSATA connection is not working. It works fine with USB. In the BIOS eSATA is enabled. Is there any other changes I need to make in the BIOS? Windows makes a sound when I plug in the eSATA cable to the computer, but not when I plug it in to the enclosure after it's plugged in to the desktop. Could the cable be bad? I need to get a handle on this fairly quickly, so I can return the enclosure if that's where the problem lies. Thanks in advance for any help.
 
The first thing I think of is that typically the eSATA port is shared with one of the standard SATA ports on the board. Just make sure you aren't already using that one for an internal drive. It is usually labelled on the motherboard.

The second thing would be the cable, but assuming you don't have a second cable handy that will be hard to verify.

Have you gone into Device Manager and confirmed that it isn't appearing at all? How about in the BIOS?
 
If you can't get it working, maybe call a shop to see if you can take the RAID unit in and have them try it on one of their PCs. If it still doesn't work, get a cable from them and try it out right there.
 
You may need an eSATA host that supports the porn multiplier feature.
 
Lunar is probably right that it's a controller issue (you'd probably have to buy a card with a SiL3132 chipset), but the other special weirdness with eSATA is cabling. Shorter cables fix a lot of eSATA weirdness.
I've also encountered eSATA enclosures that need to be powered on before the host machine for the drives to be identified properly and other enclosures that need to be off until the host OS starts to ID drives properly.

But I'd put money on your eSATA controller lacking port multiplication support, which wound prevent you from using all the drives in your enclosure.
 
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Re: eSATA not working

Thanks, ddrueding. I can't find the eSATA port on the motherboard. I just have one internal drive. I ordered a cable from eBay and will try it when it arrives. Disk Management and device manager just show the internal drive.


ddrueding said:
The first thing I think of is that typically the eSATA port is shared with one of the standard SATA ports on the board. Just make sure you aren't already using that one for an internal drive. It is usually labelled on the motherboard.

The second thing would be the cable, but assuming you don't have a second cable handy that will be hard to verify.

Have you gone into Device Manager and confirmed that it isn't appearing at all? How about in the BIOS?
Click to expand...
 
Newtun: Thanks, I'm 25 miles from town but next time I go in I'll give that a try.
 
LunarMist: I already have a porn multiplier, hehe, too much of it on my hard drive. Seriously though, it seems that even if the eSATA host didn't support port multiplier it would still show one drive. I will see if I can find out if my puter supports thats. Thanks for helping.
 
Mercutio: I believe the enclosure has a JLM chipset. The cable they supplied is about 3', but the one I ordered is 6'. I didn't know that long cables were wonky. Like I mentioned before, if my computer was lacking the port multiplier feature wouldn't one drive still show up if I had the RAID disabled?
 
I'm guessing you meant JMI or JMicron, which is essentially the other go-to choice for crappy add-on SATA controllers besides SiL. I'm not aware of a JMicron chipset with support for port (or porn, which would be really nifty too) multiplication.
 
Mercutio: You're absolutely right, it's a JMicron controller. Sorry, should have double-checked.
 
I think they are talking about the chipset in your PC not in your external enclosure.
The host controller needs to support the port multiplication feature the enclosure controller uses.
 
Yes. Port multiplication is pretty much only supported on some SiL chipsets and vastly more expensive LSI or LSI-derived ones.
 
I got it working! I went to the Dell site and installed the eSATA driver again and the computer recognized the drive before it was even done installing. I don't know what happened because the driver hasn't been updated since I last installed it. Thanks everyone for all your help!
 
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