For mobo with AMD chipset (770, 780G and above) :

Is eSATA via bracket hot swappable ? so I can remove it safely without shutdown, like USB device.

thanks.

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Asus P5Q Pro, intel E7500, Kingston KVR DDR2 2GB, Asus nvidia 9400GT silent, Hitachi sata2 500GB cache 16MB, Corsair VX450.
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Asus P2B-F, intel Pentium II, Visipro SDRAM 64MB, Asus nvidia Riva TNT, HDD Quantum 20 GB, no-name PSU.

I have eSATA bracket through my 790GX board and can tell you it is NOT hot swappable. You have to shutdown the system to remove or install devices.

E-SATA is hot swappable bracket or not. The deciding factor is having AHCI enabled in the bios. If BIOS is setup to use sata in IDE mode than no hot swapping will not work.

Set to AHCI mode and hotswap to your hearts content. If this is on an existing build than there are some steps to go through to enable AHCI within windows otherwise your system will not boot into windows.

There are issues with SB600 and AHCI in 64bit Windows. I have used AHCI and have 2 external E-Sata drives I hot swap on a regular basis and have used on both SB600 and SB700.

Hi

E-sata should be hot swappable with AHCI ebnabled, to get AHCI enabled with SB600 means having to install a suitable AHCI driver uring OS install, it needs to be added the same as if you would be adding a RAID driver...

For an existing OS installation you should be able to do a repair install, and when it detects the OS click on the add driver link, then use a floppy or USB drive with a downlaoded AHCI driver for your mobo... should be available from the mobo manufacturer website, look under RAID as RAID drivers use AHCI driver..

I have RAID setup on my SB600 ASUS M3A32-MVP and the driver that gets intalled to enable RAID is "ahci.sys"

You will have problems if you have a SATA optical drive though, as there are compatability issues with SATA HDD's and SATA Optical Drives when using AHCI for RAID or just for standalone HDD's...

I have an IDE DVD-RW drive installed now, I tried, and tried to get a SATA DVD-RW to work, but gave up in the end and used the IDE DVD-RW

I am hoping to add an external HDD soon, and have a WD MyBook Essential Edition enclosure on its way, but it only has a USB interface, but I'm hoping to modify it by using the e-sata bracket that came with the mobo, and install a sata HDD into the enclosure and use it as an e-sata external HDD....

I'd be interested in hearing how you get on with it.....

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3DMark06 = 20717 / 3DMark Vantage = P13618 / My Overclock Guide / My Troubleshooting Guide

I have AHCI working in my Vista x64 install. But I don't see my removable SATA drive in the Safely Remove Hardware list. Does any one know how to make it show up in the list?

The MB is a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H (780G chipset). Thanks.

kazgirl, SATA ODDs do work even at OS installation. You just have to have the proper drivers.

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World's best Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge mod and Star Trek: Starfleet Command 3 mod: Overmind.ro

I'm also having trouble getting the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon to show up. I've enables AHCI in the bios and I've installed the Catalyst 8.12 drivers for Southbridge from the game.amd.com site. I've installed vistax64 without any problems but the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon does not show up for the drive i plug into the esata port.

Is there anything i can try or that i've missed?

It should normally work... but there are quite a few things to consider. The correct driver for the controller the eSATA is on must be installed (and for some situations the controller must be in AHCI mode), then your driver must have support for that OS (for example, intel's ICH9R only offers hotswap in Vista, although it could work in XP just as fine) and then make sure the drives are set to 'optimized for quick removal'.

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World's best Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge mod and Star Trek: Starfleet Command 3 mod: Overmind.ro

Thanks Overload,
The drive is "Optimize for Performance" in device manager. The option to change this is greyed out. I've removed the check from "Enable write caching on the disk" but the "Safely Remove HW" still isn't showing up.

I also have the GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard
After installing the latest drivers from Gigabyte, I have an "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller" v3.1.1540.64 in my ""Storage controllers".

Does anyone else have this board and gotten hot swapping to work? If so what drivers/BIOS settings did you use?

I too want to hot-swap in XP but the "Optimize for quick removal" option is ghosted for me too.

I'm using the Asus M3A78 mobo with the AMD 770 / Southbridge 700 chipset in AHCI mode.

I've subscribed to this thread; keep us posted if anyone figures out a solution. Do you think we have to buy a new SATA controller card to do hot-swapping? Is there some sort of Asus/AMD Utility that we're meant to install to get hot-swapping to work?

My old nForce Ultra mobo (Asus A8N-E) gave me the "add-remove hardware" icon in the task bar for the hard-drive but I never even bothered using it. I just figured that all new SATA motherboards come standard with hot-swappability now adays... was that a bad assumption?

Edit: I just found this utility (hotswap), I'll let you know if/how it works.

Edit #2: Wow, this little thing works great. I was able to disconnect and reconnect the drive and it just popped right back up in my computer. I'm just a bit weary of where this little gem came from and if its safe; let me know your thoughts guys.

Edited: 12/18/2008 at 05:39 AM by HyperActive

My mobo also hase the SouthBridge 700. So i guess its a common occurrence for all of us then? Unfortunately...

Otherwise the program works like a charm with vistax64 for me. Thanks, Nice find.