Why is ESATA such a problem

Any progress?

I purchased a Welland EZSTOR eSATA/USB HDD enclosure, and battled with it for days to get it to work. The scanty installation manual was not helpful, and many of the posts on-line show how widespread the issue is. The USB connection worked fine (after working out that the eSATA and USB cable cannot be connected/used at the same time). Eventually I went back to first principles, and assumed that the manual cannot be correct in every situation.

Preparation:
Check Device Driver: if one for your drive isn't seen, then try to update drivers. It may work. If you cannot see the drive, my understanding is that checking with Computer Management is a waste of time.
Check Computer Management to see if the drive is visible. If not, you probably need to update drivers.
Check to make sure that the darned power supply is ON. (Working lights on the enclosure help).
Check (listen) to hear/see if the HDD is moving. Mine is too quiet to hear over the background noise.
If there is flicker (of light) on the HDD enclosure light, then the computer internal eSATA connection inside has power, but HDD is not recognized. This was the key test and everything was easy after this.
My computer has no specific settings for eSATA in the BIOS, it wasn't set for IDE drives, and I don't want a RAID setup, so ended up changing nothing in BIOS.
I didn't have to change my Registry settings. Some people have had to manually change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci to zero(0).

My solution:
Check all of the above.
Ignore the manual that says no drivers are needed, and get a new one for your drive. It may take some searching to get the right driver.
I used Western Digital's site to get a new WD SES Driver (all my drives are Western Digital 3TB Red as I never turn my computer off and the WD Green drives don't always cope with running all the time - downside is that there is less automatic error connection, as Red drives are designed for RAID). The web site for download was: WD SES driver download and instructions for recovering the WD SmartWare installer | WD Support

I ran WD SES Driver (64-bit) installation, waiting a minute, and the eSATA drive worked.

Maybe I'm missing something, but, I have two computers (XP-Pro 64 bit) with esata cables plugged into a sata port on mobo. I have a toshiba laptop w/W-7 & a built-in esata port. Never have troubles with them. Occaisonally, I have to rescan disks with 'disk management' or 'device manager' when swapping.

The 2 desktops I run esata to an internal drive bay sitting on the desk. <- Have a seperate P/S for it, 3 1/2" drives in bay tray or 2 1/2" & 3 1/2" bare drives fit in the bay with a piece of plexiglas to get correct height. The bare drives work just fine.

The Tosh just always works fine.

(I thought the 'e' in esata just meant 'external')

-c-

The "e" does mean "external", plugged into a specific eSATA port, not just run outside the machine.