Great, it's good to know that any SATA drives connected to the eSATA on this
ASUS board is true hotpluggable based on the agreed definition of what is
hotpluggable. I know feel more assured about plugging in my 400GB SATA
external drive into the eSATA connector on this ASUS board. This will be my
first time ever. I still think it's best for XP to treat any SATA drives
connected to the eSATA port as an external drive and give the green arrow
icon in the System Tray as a visual cue. It's a fomality of course because
this "external" drive will run at internal speed. This way, at least the
users who have been accustomed to external USB drives feel more comfortable
as a transitional step about sticking in and pulling out their external SATA
to the eSATA port while the PC is powered on.

I have always used Ghost to clone drives and create images with both SATA
and PATA drives with no problems, starting with Ghost 2003. Now I also use
Ghost 9. In case you are not familiar with Ghost 9 and the latest version 10,
you can clone and create images of the the system drive in situ. This means
the cloning and imaging occur within Windows. No need to boot from the floppy
or CD. I have not done any drive cloning yet with version 9, but I have done
lots of imagining where the images are saved with the new file format .v2i.
The great thing about this is I can create a base-line image and then
additional incremental images. The Ghost 9 CD is bootable (have tried that)
and can be used to put back legacy .gho images (have not tried that). I have
booted from the Ghost 9 CD to transfer files between IDE drives using a GUI
interface much like ERD Commander. I do not know if Ghost 9 will work with
SATA drives in this manner though.

So until more vendors release eSATA hardware, we won't know how well the
technology fares. I am a fanatic when it comes to backups, so it looks like
eSATA is a finally a God-send. You have not mentioned something about the
eSATA spec that I think is exciting: Port Multiplier. Simply put, it's akin
to a USB hub. One eSATA connector connected to an eSATA(?) hub to which a
multitudes of SATA drives can hook into. Given the high bandwidth SATA has,
this clustering of drives won't slow down data transfer much unlike
daisy-chaining firewire drives. With PM, you can finally clone to multiple
SATA drives at the same time, another huge time saver.

"Anna" wrote:

> (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
>
>
>