External Hard Drive attached by eSATA not detected

[terrorist96]

Alright, so I have an 1TB Toshiba External Hard Drive and it has the option for either USB or eSATA. I had it attached by USB up til now cuz I didn't have an eSATA cable or port. Today, I went to MicroCenter and got an eSATA to eSATA cable and a port thing that has two eSATA females and two SATA males that go into my SATA ports in my motherboard. I put the two SATA ports in my motherboard, screwed in the two eSATA ports in my case, closed the case, plugged in the eSATA cable to my computer then to my External HDD, turned my computer on, and it doesn't even detect it. Can someone help me out here, please?

 

[Jonathan_King]

Hello,

Can you see the drive in your BIOS?

 

[terrorist96]

How do I do that? Preferably not having to restart.

 

[Orpheous]

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I gotta ask:
Did you plug the power cord in?
I didn't see it listed in the steps you typed above...

 

[terrorist96]

Yeah haha. I'm not that dumb. The device is powered on. I can see the light.

 

[Orpheous]

Yeah haha. I'm not that dumb. The device is powered on. I can see the light.

Whew! No offence intended, I've seen it (and worse) before

 

[Jonathan_King]

There is no way to see if the drive is detected in the BIOS unless you reboot. Also look in Device Manager and see if it is listed.

 

[Orpheous]

Can you see the drive in Disk Management?
click start orb - type create and format - hit enter - expand window

 

[terrorist96]

No, it's not there in device manager. How can I see it in BIOS? Mind you that I have Dual BIOS so it's kinda different than regular.

 

[terrorist96]

Hey guys, I just had to restart and when I did, my system wouldn't start. It stayed at the Verifying DMI Pool Data stage. I held the power button, restarted, pressed F12 and went to boot menu, selected hard disk, picked my hard drive and it booted up just fine. But while there, I saw the Toshiba external HDD too. And right now, as my computer loaded up, it detected the External HDD.
So it resolved itself. Thanks for attempting to help me though. I appreciate it.

EDIT: I'm backing up right now and it's not going as fast as I imagined it would. I thought eSATA transferred at like 3GB/second?

EDIT2: The back up just finished. It took 14 minutes to back up 90GB. If it was going at 3GB/sec, shouldn't it have been done in less than a minute? Haha.

I just copied and pasted like 13 episodes from a show which was like 2.23GB to the external and I look at the transfer window and it was going at like 100MB/sec. That's pretty fast, and I'm not complaining, but no 3GB a second?

 

[Jonathan_King]

No matter how fast the connection is, you are limited by the speed of the hard drive. The only time you will really notice a difference is when you are using a SSD.

 

[terrorist96]

What's that?

 

[Jonathan_King]

A solid state drive. Very fast Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[546 Inspiron]

None of them ever transfer near 3gb sec, it's all advertising hype. Just try to remove any bottlenecks.

 

[ericlund]

A couple of things

I too am having the same problem with my eSata and windows 7 9USB works fine) and will be looking into my BIOS and startup order tonight as well as forcing computer management to locate drives. But what I want to clear up was that eSATA is NOT 3 GigiBYTES per second, it's 3 GigaBITS per second. This effectively makes the throughput about 300 Megabytes per second. Remember, that 1 byte = 8 bits. 3000 Mb = 375 MB. They rounded down to 300.

Now, to make it run the fastest it can, you have to adjust the policies. Go into Device Manager and expand the drives section. Find your eSATA external and right click, then click properties. Click on the policies. Be sure to check all the radio buttons for improved performance. The final checkbox is for drives with their own power supply. This allowed my drive to run roughly about 125 MB/s. Again, the bottle neck are the drives themselves here, but it is twice as fast as it was before adjusting the policies. One policy allows you to just unplug the drive without stopping it first, which slows it down. You do not want this on.

 

[terrorist96]

I don't have that option on the policies tab. I had it when I had my old Toshiba external hard drive, but now since I have an internal drive in an enclosure, the only option is the cache writing.

 

[546 Inspiron]

My Cavalry CAXH 1trb records at 22mps and won't work with eSATA as many won't with Win 7/64. I wish I could find an eSATA controller card that will work, I'm on the second one now.

 

[ericlund]

****update***

***A little background on why my drive dissapeared. I was getting a corrupted file error prior to my enclosure dissapearing. The file conatined some pictures. When I ran chkdsk in windows, it failed. I did a search on the error I was getting (something about "can't access file because it's corrupt" which means you can move it bu not delete it) I found no help other than to run chkdsk. When I ran chkdsk, it failed on the corrupted file and my drive dissapeared, but only for eSATA connections, not USB.***

Last night I went home and shut down my computer. I then hooked up the external enclosure to my eSATA port again and turned it on. I booted my PC and went into BIOS. The external showed up there and I verified it was not the boot drive. I exited BIOS and hit F12 to pick the boot menu anyway. Again, it was my C: drive, so I let the boot continue. Windows 7 Startup splash screen appeared, and right before the log on screen, it went into DOS mode and started a chkdsk of my eSATA enclosure. Sure enough, it located the previously mention corrupted files, deleted all the logs associated with them, then restored my files to original! After that, it proceeded to continue to the logon screen. When I logged on, I clicked on My Computer and sure enough there was my drive! I browsed it and I was able to access the previously corrupted file just fine. I guess the chkdsk utility runs differently in DOS mode than actually in Windows. I was able to run my back up program and write to the drive and everything. There must have been some corrupt system files in the file tables that the computer didn't like via eSATA? I don't know exactly.