How do I get back safe remove for SATA?

[Nazo]

A long time ago when I first switched to SATA (this was on a much older board -- a nForce 3 based with an Athlon 64, so needless to say things were pretty different driver/hardware-wise) I was annoyed that Windows was always showing the safe remove hardware option for my harddrive. It always struck me as a pretty stupid bad idea to have the host drive for the OS in that list. Now today I wish I still had it... The reason being that I have just recently gotten a pocket sized enclosure for 2.5" SATA drives with USB and eSATA support and a suitable drive (a Scorpio so I only need 500mA to power it and can do so from one USB bus -- which will be the main thing I use it with admitedly.) The enclosure even came with a bracket for installing in systems like mine. My board lacks any dedicated eSATA connection (which I think uses a different connector internally anyway doesn't it? So I guess if it had it I'd already have a bracket with the board and installed.) At first Windows wouldn't even see it if I plugged it in after starting the system. I followed this guide to get AHCI working without reinstalling the entire OS so now when I plug in the drive Windows does recognize it sucessfully and sets it up correctly.

However, I still have no safe remove hardware option... At this point I would put up with it showing the host drive even just to have it showing the external drive. For now I've turned off write caching for obvious safety reasons, but I'd really rather have that on since the only reason I normally deal with plugging it into eSATA in the first place (no easy task since I have to place the drive all they way on the edge of my desk and everything with my case being fairly far away and the cable being fairly small.) After all, despite its limitations, the USB 2.0 interface is nothing to sneeze at (though this enclosure seems to have a maximum sustained operation closer to 170Mbps as opposed to very close to USB 2.0's ~200Mbps maximum from my older enclosure.) Just, when transfering some 20+ GB of data, eSATA is a lot nicer than USB 2.0... Also, I can't help but think that since XP is treating it as a non-removable drive, it may not be a good thing for it to actually be removed while the OS is running... This would seem to be supported by the fact that, after I removed it, when I tried to later plug it back in Windows failed to recognize it and my CPU started spiking like mad (though it was weird as it would go up and down, so it literally spiked.) I'm betting XP just sees it as an internal drive that it simply didn't see when it first came up, so assumes no possibility of it being removed without a shutdown/reboot.

Is there any way I can get it to start offering safe remove hardware for this removable drive? Or is this little almost fake eSATA going to just end up being convenient in that I don't have to deal with actually opening the case up or anything?

 

[DonDon]

Oh, good lord, reading your post reminded me of trying to talk to my wife and 16 year old daughter at the same time.

I actually lost my train of thought half way through the first paragraph, and never really got it back till you mentioned opening up the case.

So, what are you actually asking?

If you could condense it into like maybe 1 or (gasp) 2 sentences, I may be able to help.

I personally have never bother anymore with safe removal for usb drives. It never worked most of the time anyway. It usually just said the drive is in use and can not be disconnected now. If you just transfered 20 gig, leave it plugged in for a few minutes. My external drives have activity lights on them. If it's been quiet for a few seconds, I assume Winblows is done and I pull the plug.

Don

 

[ALL4AMD]

now with flash drives i will always safely remove them as i lost all data on one once.\

external hd i don't even worry about it

 

[Nazo]

The thing is, an external harddrive is actually able to loose a LOT more data from an incomplete write operation... Besides, as I said before, simply removing it is causing a problem. Remember, SATA is not the same as USB... Especially since it's not even an actual standard eSATA but actually is SATA with a bracket.

So, what are you actually asking?

It's right there if you want to know. I've already stated it... And, despite you're extreme reaction, it's actually not that big of a post. If I must reduce everything down to two sentences, I'll end up with ten pages of two sentence responses where I have to explain all of the background that you would have me leave out. There has been discussion over this matter several times in several threads and the end result is that it doesn't really matter since -- even though ultimately others agreed that it's NOT better to throw out all information not immediately 100% relevant to the most immediate problem -- I can't really help it anyway.

I personally have never bother anymore with safe removal for usb drives. It never worked most of the time anyway.

Yes it does, it just isn't always necessary. The first and foremost thing that it does is ensures that any write operations in a cache are completed before the drive is actually removed. This can potentially make the difference of not having an entire filesystem lost... I have, in fact, had occasion to pull out a drive like this that seemed to be inactive and had filesystem damage even (though usually it will probably be the file itself that gets messed up.)

It usually just said the drive is in use and can not be disconnected now.

This is caused by anything actually actively using the drive. Simply close down anything accessing it and it will be fine after any write operations are complete. One thing that is easily missed though is Explorer. Explorer will actually be accessing any folder it is currently looking at even after a while (basically it's doing little refreshes from time to time to look for new files/etc) so as long as you have an explorer window open safe remove is likely to not work unless you catch it just right.

If you just transfered 20 gig, leave it plugged in for a few minutes. My external drives have activity lights on them. If it's been quiet for a few seconds, I assume Winblows is done and I pull the plug.

This is usually ok (though, as I said before, it's not that simple with this SATA connection -- but at least you admit you didn't bother to read it so I know this in advance) but the thing is, even a minor operation, when interrupted has some small potential for currupting the filesystem. Is this really a good idea? Why risk causing some very rough to deal with damages (chkdsk and co can't always save everything) when the solution is as simple as two clicks?

 

[DonDon]

Look, I have only been working on computers since like 1991 or so. Your original post is still hard to follow.

So after your second post, I think I finally figured out what is up.

You are plugging in an ESATA/USB drive via an external bracket that is plugged into a standard SATA port. See, one sentence. I would like to get this device to show up in the "Safe Remove Icon" in Windows. Then give the background info.

I only switched over to SATA drives about 4 years ago when I got a Raptor. Most of the drives I ran into at work were either IDE or SCSI. The medical industry is a little slow to adapt to new stuff. I have never seen a SATA drive come up under the "Safe Remove" icon. Even the SATA drives in both of my current systems do not show up in the "Safe remove icon." But, after searching on the net, others see Sata drives there as normal behavior for Winblows.

While Sata is meant to be hot swappable, it requires drivers that are "TRUE" AHCI compliant and possible motherboard support. Have you checked the MOBO bios settings to see if you have AHCI support turned on? I got this from the Wiki article.

Try reading here.

And reading here, it may be MOBO or driver dependant.

There are many more links out there.

I would check to see if your MOBO supports SATA hot swapping. Also check to see if you have the latest bios installed.

Gnight, it's late, and I'm a bit drunk.

Don

 

[Nazo]

Yes, I know what AHCI is, and yes I have it enabled on my motherboard. Trust me, I know... This board uses some kind of AHCI BIOS even (which is annoying because it adds about ten seconds to boot time for that BIOS to start up and configure things.) As for drivers, as I stated in the first post I am using them. This is the sort of reason I like to provide information ahead of time as I really don't want to have to spend a week giving that background information after the initial post since getting help through a forum tends to be slow.

Besides, as I said earlier, XP is capable of providing this option WITHOUT AHCI. AHCI is merely the correct way of handling such an operation. Without it I suppose it probably isn't doing it quite right. I can assure you though, my nForce 3 board was not AHCI compliant... Correct or no, clearly it can be done that way. Honestly, I'm not sure if I care just as long as I can turn on write caching safely. Even if I have to reboot after drive removal I think I can live with that annoyance.

 

[DonDon]

HMMMMM, did you verify that your MOBO provides SATA hot swap support?

Like I stated, this behavior seems to be MOBO and or driver dependant. If it aint specifically built into the MOBO and the drivers, it aint gonna work.

Both of my systems that have SATA drives have AHCI enabled on the MOBO, and have AHCI drivers installed but do not show the drives in the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.

Now, the Esata port on my newer ASUS P5K MOBO has a separate controller chip for that port. While I cannot test it out, I bet that if I plugged a drive into that port, it would show up as a removable drive. It may be that your MOBO manufacturer did not include hot plug support. If they did not include hot plug support for the internal ports, then it will never show up as a removable drive.

Don

PS, does your MOBO support Raid? If so, that is the bios you are seeing on start up. If you are not using Raid, see if there is a bios setting to turn it off and it will not annoy you during startup.

 

[Old Hippie]

Wanna try the easy way? Install the HotSwap program.

It'll probably show ALL your drives as hot swappable.

 

[XS Janus]

Yeah I played around with removing Hot sata drives and my data hdd became RAW partition.
After that scenario I had a bad experience with AHCI working on XP. To much trouble.

The only combination I would try this is AHCI + Vista + newer SATA2 drive.
It works flawlessly as far as plugging unplugging is concerned. But installing Vista on a n AHCI enabled boards were painfully slow in my experience and boot up times went up quite a bit.

 

[Nazo]

No. I'm not switching to Vista for eSATA or anything else like that. It's going to take something that has no workarounds for me to switch to Vista and I assure you that having to use USB 2.0 is not so bad that I'd switch to Vista just to get eSATA (besides which, it seems even at that it's not THAT much faster... Perhaps a limitation of the drive's capabilities as it is designed first for economic power consumption and low heat.) Honestly, Vista is not a solution for many people (including myself) but instead a whole new even larger problem (I have never understood this tendency many people have to solve one problem by substituting another... Not that I'm suggesting that this is specifically what you are trying to do, just that I see this very often and for me this is exactly what that would be.)

Wanna try the easy way? Install the HotSwap program.

It'll probably show ALL your drives as hot swappable.

Because I didn't know of that program, that's why. Thanks for the perfect solution! BTW, it's actually pretty smart. It does not show my internal drive at all.

 

[XS Janus]

Just watch out for all those "OS patches" to many of those and you end up with a mozaic of an OS that nobody can help you with when a problem arises.
Stock is stock - I learned to live with the flaws to make my life simpler and to have more free time to think about other things than what app is messing with the other.

 

[Nazo]

Oh don't worry. I'm one of the first to keep my PC down to a minimalist setup. I keep the number of programs running on my system during startup/etc down to a minimum -- even not allowing crap like those autoupdate services that things such as Java install without bothering to ask you for permission or provide an official means of disabling. Heck, even my shell is the far more minimalist bbLean (based on Blackbox for Windows) using far fewer resources than explorer. The thing is, this program doesn't have to actually run all of the time, just when needed. It's a simple and clean solution to the issue I think. Maybe not perfect, but definitely a very viable solution that doesn't bring up a host of other problems and most certainly better than nothing which is the only alternative offered so far essentially.

To this day I'm STILL bugged by the fact that I must actually allow my mouse drivers to run an extra program just to manage things like the DPI setting and it drives me up a wall that BlueTooth support requires a service AND a program running all of the time even when no adapter is plugged in...

 

[XS Janus]

To this day I'm STILL bugged by the fact that I must actually allow my mouse drivers to run an extra program just to manage things like the DPI setting and it drives me up a wall that BlueTooth support requires a service AND a program running all of the time even when no adapter is plugged in...

I hear Ya!