E6400- No eSata hotplugging supported?!

Hey all, can i get some confirmation from anyone able to sucessfully hotplug an eSata drive?

I have a 1TB drive from the old desktop that I have put into a Vantec 3 external enclosure with eSata. Hooked it up with no problems, was able to see it, transfer files, etc no worries.

However,when I came to unplug it, the issue arises. Does not show up as a 'safely remove hardware' item. OK then, I thought I would turn the switch off on the Vantec then unplug (when was sitting idle of course).

BANG! Blue screen.

Seems Dell have not added hotplugging support for eSata, or am I missing something? Sucks, because this means everytime want to remove the drive, have to shut down system first.

Thoughts?
Stu

 

Are you running in IDE or AHCI mode? Not sure how the eSATA is supported on the E6400 but AFAIK AHCI drivers are need for hotplugging.

 

eSATA works fine for me. I just checked and the drive is listed under the Safely Remove Hardware option, as is the optical drive. I have my HDD set to AHCI in the BIOS.

Try installing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (get from the Dell download site) which also fixes some of the burning problems with the optical drive.

John

 

Thank you both! The problem was twofold.... I both did not have the HDD in AHCI mode, nor the Intel Matrix drivers installed.

I had to reformat in order to set to AHCI mode (the warning in BIOS was true to its word, would not boot after I changed the mode). That was OK though, as I got to try out vLite and customise it quite a bit, went very smoothly.

After the reformat, and installing the AHCI drivers, voila, able to hotplug the eSata drive

Cheers
Stu

 

Had you intentionally set your BIOS to ATA? My E6400 came with the matrix storage loaded and running. It was actually set to IRRT (Intel Rapid Restore Technology) which is a further option designed for RAID operation. I changed that the AHCI without any driver problems and my E6400 no longer offers to set up a RAID system if I boot with a HDD attached to the eSATA port.

John

 

Yeah, it was set to IRRT, I hadn't changed it. It didn't like me changing to AHCI, would not even boot to windows after changing to that (although I could change back to IRRT and was fine....). So just decided to format the thing, I had been wanting to try VLite anyway, so that was a good excuse.



Stu