I cant seem to hot-swap drives over ESATA with an ATI SB 850 chipset. Is hot-swapping with ESATA supported by this chipset?

Motherboard: Asrock 880G Extreme 3
ESATA dock: Thermaltake BlackX (ST0005U)
Hard Drives: Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
OS: Win7U64

The drives mounts up fine if they are powered on before the computer POSTs. But hot-swapping hasnt worked at all yet.

I've installed the SB driver from game.amd.com....just dont know what else to do.

Help help help

Install the latest BIOS, enter BIOS, enable AHCI, rebbot, enter BIOS and enable hotswap for each sata port.

Thanks mikedepetris!

Install the latest BIOS:...... Already did that
enter BIOS, enable AHCI, rebbot:......Already did that

enter BIOS and enable hotswap for each sata port:.......errrr. I cant find this option anywhere. Are you sure it applies to the BIOS on this MB?

Thanks!

One thing I found out while playing with eSata on a SB750 machine is that the eSata could not be shutdown by Windows unless they had the fifth power wire active. This is the 3.3 volt wire, usually orange.

For my tests, I was connecting an eSata to SATA cable from a bare drive to a motherboard rear eSata port and simply re-routing internal power connectors externaly to the drive. In the first case, it was a molex 4-wire to SATA power adapter. In the second case, it was one of the actual 5-wire SATA power connectors from the power supply. The second case worked.

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Two each: Phenom II x6 1090T on MSI 870A-G-54 with 16 GB DDR3 and Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

Two each: Asroch E350M1 with 8 GB DDR2

Athlon II x4 630 on Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 with 16 GB DDR3 and Windows 7 x64

Well, in the BIOS under Advanced/Storage I set the "grouping" option to Disabled and not hot-swapping ESATA works perfect.

woohoo!