(THIS DISCUSSION HAS CENTERED ON THE NEW eSATA (EXTERNAL) PORT INCLUDED ON
SOME ASUS MOTHERBOARDS. THIS PORT IS DESIGNED SO THAT A SATA HD RESIDING
OUTSIDE THE CASE CAN BE CONNECTED TO THAT PORT. THE BASIC ADVANTAGE IS THAT
THE SYSTEM THEN TREATS THAT "EXTERNAL" HD AS AN INTERNAL HD)

"Techmanblues" <Techmanblues@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:EEB2AFD6-014B-4735-92B1-3E34D566D60C@microsoft.com...
(SNIP)
Now that I have this ASUS motherboard, can you tell me in more details on
exactly what happens when you use the eSATA connector? You mentioned that
when plugged into the eSATA port, the computer "treats" the SATA drive as an
internal drive and therefore the user enjoys all the benefits that is of an
internal drive. Of course that is true, but you did not mention that whether
you plug that SATA drive into it directly while the computer is on and that
the computer detects the drive and the new drive shows up in Explorer? Do
you see the green arrow in the System Tray? If you don't, and when you want
to turn off the external SATA drive, you simply turn off the power to the
drive and XP does not complain like it would it you had power down an
internal drive (the litte red X over the icon of the drive)?


Techmanblues:
This thread is getting a bit unwieldy at this point so I've not included our
past exchanges on this issue and am responding to your latest specific
query.

Yes, following a normal bootup with your internal HD you can connect the
"external" SATA HD to the eSATA port and the system will instantly recognize
it as an internal drive. It will be listed in Windows Explorer (and Disk
Management) as a "normal" internal HD. Please understand that since the
system detects the eSATA-connected drive as a internal drive, the "green
arrow" (Safely Remove Hardware icon) does *not* appear in the Notification
Area (SysTray) since the eSATA-connected drive is *not* a USB/Firewire
device.

Based on our experience to date with this ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard,
the eSATA-connected drive is "hot-pluggable". As I previously informed you,
using a variety of SATA II drives - WD, Hitachi, and Samsung - we could
connect/disconnect the drive during normal operations without any problem
whatsoever. The system would instantly recognize the drive when it was
plugged in and instantly lose that recognition when the drive was
disconnected. To the best of our knowledge we suffered no data loss or
corruption during these processes.

While we're on this subject, I want to add one other thing...

I would assume that many, if not most users will be employing the
eSATA-connected drive as a backup device. That is our primary, if not
exclusive, use for this external device. In nearly all cases we use an
external drive as the recipient of the cloned contents of our day-to-day
working (internal) HD. We (primarily) use the Norton Ghost 2003 disk imaging
program to perform the cloning operation. We've had no problem in so doing,
regardless of whether the eSATA drive was the destination disk (which it
would normally be) or whether it was the source disk should restoration of
the internal drive be necessary. And once again - less we lose the real
importance of what we are discussing... THE CLONED eSATA DRIVE IS BOOTABLE!

But we have encountered a serious problem trying to use the Acronis True
Image 8 (build 937, which I believe is the latest "build" for that version)
disk imaging program. Judging from the number of postings concerning the use
of disk imaging programs for backup purposes, I'm aware that many users
employ the ATI program for that purpose. The problem we encountered was
that ATI did not detect the eSATA-connected HD, so the cloning operation
could not proceed. As a matter of fact we encountered this same
non-recognition problem with ATI when a PATA drive was connected along with
one or two internal SATA drives. Again, ATI did not detect the PATA drive.
There was no problem with the Ghost 2003 program with this configuration.
Ghost detected all the drives connected in the system - internal SATA, PATA,
and, of course, the eSATA drive we've been discussing. I'm aware there's a
new version 9 of ATI, but I haven't worked with it.
Anna