Sata backplane help

Y

YourPaceOrMine

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
304
i bought one of these

http://www.arrowmax.com/storefront/product_info.php?cPath=34_30&products_id=214

so that i wont have 3 hard drives on all the time. i use the 3 hard drives to store movies/music/etc. i dont want to use raid or anything.

anyway, i put it all together with the hope that i can just press the power button in the front for the desired hard drive and it'll turn on and is recognized in windows 7.

it doesnt work like that in real life, unfortunately. I have to turn on 2 drives just to get 1 to be recognized in windows. it's a pain in the butt because i have to press the power buttons in a certain order or it wont show (and it's random). sometimes ill turn on/press all 3 power buttons and only 2 hard drives will appear in win7. sometimes i turn on all 3 and only 1 will appear in win7.

i have an asus p5n73-am mobo

anyone got an idea of what my problem is?
 
that's the thing.... it was originally set to IDE when i installed the backplane and windows never recognize any drives no matter what i did. i changed it to AHCI and then windows does what i originally posted, recognizing the drives randomly.

i think i read somewhere that i have to set it to AHCI and let windows install drivers for it fresh. meaning i have to reformat with AHCI enabled.... is this right?
 
seems like win7 doesnt need ahci drivers...... whereas vista/xp did... =/ doesnt sound like that's the problem?
 
YourPaceOrMine said:
i think i read somewhere that i have to set it to AHCI and let windows install drivers for it fresh. meaning i have to reformat with AHCI enabled.... is this right?
Click to expand...

I think that wound only apply if one of the drives is your boot drive (changing from IDE to AHCI after the fact will screw up a Windows install, requiring a re-install or a registry fix), but I believe you definitely need AHCI to be able to hot-swap SATA drives either way.
 
It might be the device itself that has problems. Return it and try a different one maybe.
 
Check into this hot swap software:

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

Mostly very handy in removing a drive but it also has a quick link for the device manager discover new hardware feature that is required sometimes to pick up a new drive.

Now the rest here is my personal experience. Use AHCI for the disks. I have found that even motherboards that technically don't have eSATA may support it, check the BIOS but this adds a ton of time to the boot process for detecting disks that aren't attached as it has to wait for a timeout. Personally I am not using it and just do this; all hot swappable drives must be attached and turned on when you boot the computer. From here the BIOS will recognize that that port is in use and keep it turned on so that you can later hot swap whatever you want. This may not be required if you have eSATA or that ability turned on in your BIOS. Generally I have found that if nothing is attached to the port at the time of POST then the port will never work no matter what, having a drive attached or enabling eSATA removable drive enabled for that port fixes that problem.

Removing a drive with the above software is very easy, just like removing a USB stick the proper way using the task bar item. It takes a while but it parks the heads and spins down the drive to make it safe to pull.
 
hmm, weird.... looks like i got it working. i just uninstalled the microsoft ahci 1.0 drivers, rebooted and let it reinstall again. works like a charm now, thanks for the help guys :D
 
Are you able to plug it in post-boot and have it be recognized as well?
 
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