External SATA (E-SATA) hot pluggabability?

[BDD]

Hi. So I've heard E-SATA is hot pluggable but its not working on my
setup. I have a fairly popular ASUS motherboard (ASUS P5-B Deluxe).

I have an External SATA HDD connected right now through the E-SATA
connector on the back of the mobo with a 500GB Western Digital SATA.
The device works fine and gives good performance but Windows Vista shows
no options for disconnecting the drive through that "Safely Remove
Hardware" tray icon. From all appearances, I might as well have plugged
this thing into an internal SATA connector!

Incidentally, my USB connected drives all connect/disconnect (usually).
That is one of the reasons why I want to switch to E-SATA. Not only
for better efficiency but USB has been proving to be unreliable at times
where it fails to recognize the USB drive forcing me to repeatedly
physically disconnect and reconnect the drive's USB cable until it
finally works. Grrr. Anybody else get this at times?

I've gone through all the BIOS options I know but haven't come across
anything I recognize that allows/disallows E-SATA hot plugability. Can
anyone point me in the right direction as to how to get this thing to
work? Is this a BIOS setting, OS setting or both?

Relevant System specs:

ASUS P5B-Deluxe mobo (Intel P965 chipset) (BIOS version 1004)
Intel Core 2 Duo E-6400
4096 MB DDR2-800 RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition



TIA!

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi. So I've heard E-SATA is hot pluggable but its not working on my
setup. I have a fairly popular ASUS motherboard (ASUS P5-B Deluxe).

I have an External SATA HDD connected right now through the E-SATA
connector on the back of the mobo with a 500GB Western Digital SATA.
The device works fine and gives good performance but Windows Vista shows
no options for disconnecting the drive through that "Safely Remove
Hardware" tray icon. From all appearances, I might as well have plugged
this thing into an internal SATA connector!

Incidentally, my USB connected drives all connect/disconnect (usually).
That is one of the reasons why I want to switch to E-SATA. Not only
for better efficiency but USB has been proving to be unreliable at times
where it fails to recognize the USB drive forcing me to repeatedly
physically disconnect and reconnect the drive's USB cable until it
finally works. Grrr. Anybody else get this at times?

Not with working hardware. I suspect you have some issue there.
Might be a chipset going bad or really bad external enclisures.

I've gone through all the BIOS options I know but haven't come across
anything I recognize that allows/disallows E-SATA hot plugability. Can
anyone point me in the right direction as to how to get this thing to
work? Is this a BIOS setting, OS setting or both?

Relevant System specs:

ASUS P5B-Deluxe mobo (Intel P965 chipset) (BIOS version 1004)
Intel Core 2 Duo E-6400
4096 MB DDR2-800 RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition

For SATA hotplug you need a) chipset (controller) support and
b) OS support. I have it working with an nVidia CK804
chipset under both Linux and Windows. However some research
done when looking into why it would not work with an other
computer revealed that many chipsets do not support SATA
hotplug. I really don't know what SAATA controller your
Mainboard uses, bit only some Intel controllers do have
hotplug support. Best first find out what SATA controller
you have and post it here. One thing you can also
try is to actually hot-plug, i.e. boot computer into the OS
then connect the drive. If the OS detects it, the hardware
likely has hotplug support.

The second issue is that the OS has to find out this drive
is supposed to be hot-plugged. Of course there is no way
in software to differentiate between an internal SATA drive
and a drive connected via eSATA. So you have to find out
how to tell Vista that this drive is hotpluggable in
any case. Unless hotplugging it once fixes that? If not,
there should be a possibility to set drive properties to
"this drive is removable" or something like it.

Arno

 

[BDD]

Thanks for the info. Yeah, I would not be surprised if the cheap
enclosures I bought have bad USB implementations. Another complication
is the possibility of bad USB hubs.

The ASUS P5B-Deluxe uses an extra JMicron chip to do the E-SATA and IDE.
Specifically, it is the "JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller" as
specified on this page:

http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=307&l4=0&model=1295&modelmenu=2

ASUS calls their E-SATA "SATA on-the-go". I'm thinking that might not
be fully E-SATA compliant. There is a small discussion about this
"on-the-go" thing on this page:

http://www.overclockers.co.nz/forums/showthread.php?t=23712

 

[Alexander Grigoriev]

For a device to show in "Safely remove" list, its driver (or its controller
driver) should mark it as "Removeable". My guess is that an existing driver
for your on-board SATA controller doesn't know that those ports are for an
external device, so it doesn't mark them as such. The driver should also be
able to detect hot plug. I guess the generic one is not.

Regarding USB, it's very sensitive to the PCB layout from the controller to
the connectors. I also have an ASUS board and its USB ports are all very
unreliable. One port will only recognize high-speed devices as USB 1.1. Even
though they all are connected to the same controller.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Thanks for the info. Yeah, I would not be surprised if the cheap
enclosures I bought have bad USB implementations. Another complication
is the possibility of bad USB hubs.

The ASUS P5B-Deluxe uses an extra JMicron chip to do the E-SATA and IDE.
Specifically, it is the "JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller" as
specified on this page:

ASUS calls their E-SATA "SATA on-the-go". I'm thinking that might not
be fully E-SATA compliant. There is a small discussion about this
"on-the-go" thing on this page:

http://www.overclockers.co.nz/forums/showthread.php?t=23712

As far as I can tell, the JM controllers are AHCI compliant
and support hotplugging.

Arno

 

[Anna]

Hi. So I've heard E-SATA is hot pluggable but its not working on my
setup. I have a fairly popular ASUS motherboard (ASUS P5-B Deluxe).

I have an External SATA HDD connected right now through the E-SATA
connector on the back of the mobo with a 500GB Western Digital SATA. The
device works fine and gives good performance but Windows Vista shows no
options for disconnecting the drive through that "Safely Remove Hardware"
tray icon. From all appearances, I might as well have plugged this thing
into an internal SATA connector!

Incidentally, my USB connected drives all connect/disconnect (usually).
That is one of the reasons why I want to switch to E-SATA. Not only for
better efficiency but USB has been proving to be unreliable at times where
it fails to recognize the USB drive forcing me to repeatedly physically
disconnect and reconnect the drive's USB cable until it finally works.
Grrr. Anybody else get this at times?

I've gone through all the BIOS options I know but haven't come across
anything I recognize that allows/disallows E-SATA hot plugability. Can
anyone point me in the right direction as to how to get this thing to
work? Is this a BIOS setting, OS setting or both?

Relevant System specs:

ASUS P5B-Deluxe mobo (Intel P965 chipset) (BIOS version 1004)
Intel Core 2 Duo E-6400
4096 MB DDR2-800 RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition

BDD:
Your WD SATA HDD with a SATA-II interface (3.0 Gb/s) has "hot-pluggable"
(a/k/a "hot-swappable") capability. Ditto your ASUS board with the eSATA
port.

Ordinarily with connected "hot-pluggable" SATA HDDs connected the system
will not display the "Safely Remove Icon" in the Notification Area (the
systray). It's simply not needed in the case of a SATA-II device supported
by the motherboard as it is in your system.

Now with *some* motherboards with some NVIDIA chipsets (and possibly other
chipsets) the SRI *will* appear in the Notification Area. When it does it's
entirely superfluous and need not be activated-accessed in any way with
respect to a SATA-II "hot-pluggable" HDD.

In any event you can connect & disconnect your WD SATA HDD in the identical
fashion as you would, for example, using a USB external HDD. (I'm assuming
of course that the SATA HDD is employed as a secondary HDD in the system).

There is, however, one somewhat annoying feature which I'm nearly (not
absolutely) sure applies to your ASUS motherboard. If you connect your SATA
HDD *after* the system boots, the system will not detect that drive. You
will need to access Device Manager, right-click on "Disk drives" and select
"Scan for hardware changes" from the submenu. The drive will then be
recognized and listed - and more importantly, usable.
Anna

 

[Arno Wagner]

BDD:
Your WD SATA HDD with a SATA-II interface (3.0 Gb/s) has "hot-pluggable"
(a/k/a "hot-swappable") capability. Ditto your ASUS board with the eSATA
port.

Ordinarily with connected "hot-pluggable" SATA HDDs connected the system
will not display the "Safely Remove Icon" in the Notification Area (the
systray). It's simply not needed in the case of a SATA-II device supported
by the motherboard as it is in your system.

That is patently untrue! If you unplug a device unsafely, the write
buffer may not have been commited to it and data loss and disk
corruption is quite possible!

The real reason is that there is no way to tell insoftware whether an
SATA device is external and hence Microsoft may them all as
internal by default. My XP installation classifies them all
as removable, even my internal disk, which is the sensible thing to do.

Now with *some* motherboards with some NVIDIA chipsets (and possibly other
chipsets) the SRI *will* appear in the Notification Area. When it does it's
entirely superfluous and need not be activated-accessed in any way with
respect to a SATA-II "hot-pluggable" HDD.

Absolutely not. You have to remove the disk safely (giving the OS the
time to flush its buffers) for a safe unplug.

In any event you can connect & disconnect your WD SATA HDD in the identical
fashion as you would, for example, using a USB external HDD. (I'm assuming
of course that the SATA HDD is employed as a secondary HDD in the system).

That is true and you absolutely have to "safely remove" and USB HDD
before unplugging it, since otherwise you can get the cited data-loss
and filesystem corruption.

Usually no data will be bufferd for devices recognized as removable,
hence buffers are allways written through. This may still take time,
depending on the amount of data to be written. If you unplug during
these writes, you will loose data. However if you allways wait until
the data has been written, you do not loose data on an unannounced
(to the OS) unplug. If that is what you are doing, you likely have
been lucky so far.

And don't cite me SATA as hot-pluggable. While true, it concerns the
electrical connection and not the data-buffering by the OS!

For devices not recognized as removable, disk buffering is more
extensive and data can stay in the buffers (an not yet on disk)
longer. The traditional upper limit before a forced flush to disk
is 5 minutes. I don't know what Microsoft uses.

Arno

 

[BDD]

BDD:
Your WD SATA HDD with a SATA-II interface (3.0 Gb/s) has "hot-pluggable"
(a/k/a "hot-swappable") capability. Ditto your ASUS board with the eSATA
port.

Ordinarily with connected "hot-pluggable" SATA HDDs connected the system
will not display the "Safely Remove Icon" in the Notification Area (the
systray). It's simply not needed in the case of a SATA-II device supported
by the motherboard as it is in your system.

Now with *some* motherboards with some NVIDIA chipsets (and possibly other
chipsets) the SRI *will* appear in the Notification Area. When it does it's
entirely superfluous and need not be activated-accessed in any way with
respect to a SATA-II "hot-pluggable" HDD.

In any event you can connect & disconnect your WD SATA HDD in the identical
fashion as you would, for example, using a USB external HDD. (I'm assuming
of course that the SATA HDD is employed as a secondary HDD in the system).

There is, however, one somewhat annoying feature which I'm nearly (not
absolutely) sure applies to your ASUS motherboard. If you connect your SATA
HDD *after* the system boots, the system will not detect that drive. You
will need to access Device Manager, right-click on "Disk drives" and select
"Scan for hardware changes" from the submenu. The drive will then be
recognized and listed - and more importantly, usable.
Anna

Hi Anna. Thanks for the tip. After double checking that no
applications were using this drive, I unplugged the eSATA cable. Vista
didn't even notice it was disconnected. The drive letter still shows up
in Windows Explorer and it still reports a drive exists!

I too have encounter the issue where an external USB drive does *not*
show up in the "Remove Hardware" tray icon. But the USB drives are
always hot swappable though because I plug in the drive *after* booting
Vista. As Arno commented, I would rather have drives appear in the
Remove Hardware tray because, when disconnecting, the OS will flush
write buffers and ensure that no processes have open files.

 

[BDD]

I had a firm hunch this USB problem was low level. It sucks that a big
manufacturer like ASUS does not produce fully compliant USB ports.
Maybe I'll have to get a good USB add-on card. The problem is at
minimal annoying and most likely dangerous to my data! :-(

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi Anna. Thanks for the tip. After double checking that no
applications were using this drive, I unplugged the eSATA cable. Vista
didn't even notice it was disconnected. The drive letter still shows up
in Windows Explorer and it still reports a drive exists!

That is why doing this is an extremely bad and risky idea. Don't do
it if you care about your data.

I too have encounter the issue where an external USB drive does *not*
show up in the "Remove Hardware" tray icon. But the USB drives are
always hot swappable though because I plug in the drive *after* booting
Vista. As Arno commented, I would rather have drives appear in the
Remove Hardware tray because, when disconnecting, the OS will flush
write buffers and ensure that no processes have open files.

It is not only open files. Filesystem metadata itself might still be
bufferd.

Arno

 

[Eric Gisin]

That is patently untrue! If you unplug a device unsafely, the write
buffer may not have been commited to it and data loss and disk
corruption is quite possible!

The real reason is that there is no way to tell insoftware whether an
SATA device is external and hence Microsoft may them all as
internal by default. My XP installation classifies them all
as removable, even my internal disk, which is the sensible thing to do.

You don't have a ****ing clue, Arnie.

The driver, not XP, indicates whether SATA is hot plug or not.
Drivers should have a option to control this, but MS is not to blame.
If your system really shows them as removable, you ****ed up.

Absolutely not. You have to remove the disk safely (giving the OS the
time to flush its buffers) for a safe unplug.


That is true and you absolutely have to "safely remove" and USB HDD
before unplugging it, since otherwise you can get the cited data-loss
and filesystem corruption.

If it really is removable you can set Optimize for Quick Removable,
and you and unplug when not in use. Same as floppies.

Usually no data will be bufferd for devices recognized as removable,
hence buffers are allways written through. This may still take time,
depending on the amount of data to be written. If you unplug during
these writes, you will loose data. However if you allways wait until
the data has been written, you do not loose data on an unannounced
(to the OS) unplug. If that is what you are doing, you likely have
been lucky so far.

And don't cite me SATA as hot-pluggable. While true, it concerns the
electrical connection and not the data-buffering by the OS!

SATA, 1394, and USB are all hot-plug.
You simply don't get it, removable is not hot-plug.

For devices not recognized as removable, disk buffering is more
extensive and data can stay in the buffers (an not yet on disk)
longer. The traditional upper limit before a forced flush to disk
is 5 minutes. I don't know what Microsoft uses.

No one in their right mind keeps dirty buffers for 5 mins.
Insane people will use crap like Lunix and spew bullshit like you.

 

[Anna]

Hi Anna. Thanks for the tip. After double checking that no applications
were using this drive, I unplugged the eSATA cable. Vista didn't even
notice it was disconnected. The drive letter still shows up in Windows
Explorer and it still reports a drive exists!

I too have encounter the issue where an external USB drive does *not* show
up in the "Remove Hardware" tray icon. But the USB drives are always hot
swappable though because I plug in the drive *after* booting Vista. As
Arno commented, I would rather have drives appear in the Remove Hardware
tray because, when disconnecting, the OS will flush write buffers and
ensure that no processes have open files.

BDD:
Let me relate to you (and others) our experience with SATA HDDs as it
pertains to this "hot-pluggable" ("hot-swappable") issue. Over the past two
years or so we have worked primarily with SATA-II HDDs (more correctly known
as SATA-IO but that's another story!) but also a few SATA-I HDDs that the
manufacturer indicated "hot-pluggable" capability was present. But most of
our experience has been with the SATA-II models.

We have worked with these drives from virtually every major manufacturer
with a sampling of their various models in different disk capacities. While
I don't have any record of the number of SATA-II drives we worked with I
would estimate it was about 100 different makes/models. In doing so we
worked with a fairly wide variety of motherboards that supported SATA-II
capability including the few ASUS motherboards that provided an eSATA port
as well as using eSATA adapters and fitting them to the machine.

To determine the effectiveness of these SATA-II drives as it affected their
supposed "hot-pluggability" capability we connected & disconnected the
drives from running systems hundreds of times and we did not experience a
single instance - not a single instance - of data loss/corruption or damage
to the disk itself. Obviously when we did disconnect the drive from a
running system we took reasonable care that the drive was not currently
involved in any write activity, i.e., activity involving moving/copying
large chunks of data. But we took no extroardinary precautions in these SATA
drive connect/disconnect exercises and in those relatively few cases where
the Safely Remove Icon was present and obviously related to the installed
SATA HDD (what you've experienced) we never invoked the Stop command
associated with that icon. We simply "pulled the plug" as it were.

I can only relate to you & others our experience in this area. But if you
feel more comfortable using some other process for disconnecting your SATA
HDD from a running system then by all means do so.
Anna

 

[Arno Wagner]

Anna wrote:

[...]
BDD:
Let me relate to you (and others) our experience with SATA HDDs as it
pertains to this "hot-pluggable" ("hot-swappable") issue. Over the past two
years or so we have worked primarily with SATA-II HDDs (more correctly known
as SATA-IO but that's another story!) but also a few SATA-I HDDs that the
manufacturer indicated "hot-pluggable" capability was present. But most of
our experience has been with the SATA-II models.

We have worked with these drives from virtually every major manufacturer
with a sampling of their various models in different disk capacities. While
I don't have any record of the number of SATA-II drives we worked with I
would estimate it was about 100 different makes/models. In doing so we
worked with a fairly wide variety of motherboards that supported SATA-II
capability including the few ASUS motherboards that provided an eSATA port
as well as using eSATA adapters and fitting them to the machine.

To determine the effectiveness of these SATA-II drives as it affected their
supposed "hot-pluggability" capability we connected & disconnected the
drives from running systems hundreds of times and we did not experience a
single instance - not a single instance - of data loss/corruption or damage
to the disk itself. Obviously when we did disconnect the drive from a
running system we took reasonable care that the drive was not currently
involved in any write activity, i.e., activity involving moving/copying
large chunks of data.

First, no damage to the disk should result from any plugging with
SATA disks.

Making sure there is not disk activity works. If the disk is otherwise
idle, any sane OS flushes disk buffers immediately. However if you
overlook something, you will have data loss. The thing is that the
only sure way to ensure the disk is not currently involved in write
activity, is a safe unplug.

But we took no extroardinary precautions in these SATA
drive connect/disconnect exercises and in those relatively few cases where
the Safely Remove Icon was present and obviously related to the installed
SATA HDD (what you've experienced) we never invoked the Stop command
associated with that icon. We simply "pulled the plug" as it were.

I can only relate to you & others our experience in this area. But
if you feel more comfortable using some other process for
disconnecting your SATA HDD from a running system then by all means
do so.
Anna

Well, basically ''pulling the plug'' is similar to an abrupt power
failure. If there is no write activity and the OS buffers are flushed
to disk, no problem. If you overlook something, you will loose data.
Depending on usage pattern, it can be easy or hard to determine whether
writes are happening. For example I sometimes unplug SATA disks on
Linux after a "sync", but without umount. For a data-disk that is
pretty safe. For a disk were some application or the OS may write
at any time, this is risky.

Take your pick. But don't complain if you loose something. It is a bit
like backup: Usually not needed, but occasionally needed very much
and after the fact it is too late. Unplugging because ''nothing bad has
happened so far'' is experimental and you might not know what your
specific risks are. A safe unplug works reliably, does not require
any analysis whether there still is write activity and is minimally
more effort.

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

BDD:
Your WD SATA HDD with a SATA-II interface (3.0 Gb/s) has "hot-pluggable"
(a/k/a "hot-swappable") capability. Ditto your ASUS board with the eSATA port.

Ordinarily with connected "hot-pluggable" SATA HDDs connected the system
will not display the "Safely Remove Icon" in the Notification Area (the
systray). It's simply not needed in the case of a SATA-II device supported
by the motherboard as it is in your system.

Now with *some* motherboards with some NVIDIA chipsets (and possibly other
chipsets) the SRI *will* appear in the Notification Area.

When it does it's entirely superfluous and need not be activated-accessed in
any way with respect to a SATA-II "hot-pluggable" HDD.

Yeah, obviously it has external sensors that makes it anticipate if and when you
are going to yank it out.

In any event

you can connect & disconnect your WD SATA HDD in the identical
fashion as you would, for example, using a USB external HDD.

Which obviously is not "In any event".

(I'm assuming of course that the SATA HDD is employed as a secondary HDD
in the system).

There is, however, one somewhat annoying feature which I'm nearly (not
absolutely) sure applies to your ASUS motherboard. If you connect your
SATA HDD *after* the system boots, the system will not detect that drive.
You will need to access Device Manager, right-click on "Disk drives" and select
"Scan for hardware changes" from the submenu. The drive will then be
recognized and listed - and more importantly, usable.

In other words it's not "hot-pluggable" at all.

 

[John Turco]

I had a firm hunch this USB problem was low level. It sucks that a big
manufacturer like ASUS does not produce fully compliant USB ports.
Maybe I'll have to get a good USB add-on card. The problem is at
minimal annoying and most likely dangerous to my data! :-(

<heavily edited, for brevity>

Hello, BDD:

I doubt that it's very unusual; my Tyan S1830S "Tsunami" (AT mainboard)
is known to suffer the same issue, for example.

However, as I've always used a PCI USB card, I have no firsthand
experience of this fault.


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>