What I wonder is whether the externals get powered down? Maybe if you power cycled them instead of the PC? My E-SATA experience is with on-board controllers and mine has to be powered externally with a DC adapter. Also, I don't sleep my PC.
Hmm, did you check power management tab of the controller in device manager? See Step 6 - Power Options and Sleep Mode Problems. This may cause sleep problem so experiment and uncheck if sleep gets disrupted.
How long does it take to boot the computer?
Does your motherboard have two eSata ports. Some have one that is powered and one that needs external power.
Your motherboard manual should have this information.
It takes a looong time for my PC to boot. Around 80% of the time, at some point after my desktop appears and all my icons star loading at the bottom in my tray, my PC freezes solid - I can't do anything, and the clock even freezes - and it stays frozen for 10-11 minutes, then suddenly it unfreezes and the hard drive fininshes loading up the icons, software, etc. and then the PC is useable like normal. I have no idea why this happens and it's been happening for almost a year. I plan to buy a new PC soon anyways but I'd love to solve this issue.
For the ESATA ports, I have 1 ESATA card installed and 1 USB3 card installed. The USB3 card works fine with no issues. The ESTA card and the USB3 card are both powered and they are both receiving power.
I would try uninstalling security software and a clean startup - Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup
I haven't tried a clean startup but I did switch from Avira to Avast a couple months ago and the startup issues happened with both Avira and Avast.
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