Samsung R780 esata question

Hi, first post, hope I'm doing this right.

I have a Samsung R780, really love the laptop, and I'm wondering about its esata functionality.

I have an external dual sata dock that I've used with a pc before, and when I plug it into the pc via esata, the pc sees both hard drives. However, when I plug it into my laptop only 1 hard drive is picked up by the laptop.

I did some googling, and as best as I can tell I need something called "port multiplier" on my esata in order to see both external hard drives. Is there a away to verify whether my R780 has this port multiplier? If it does have it, is there a setting or driver or something that I can do to turn it on?

Thanks in advance.

Leon

 

I presume that your PC is a desktop for which port multiplier support is more likely. I don't think I have come across normal notebook computers with this capability.

John

 

Hi. Well the PC is a desktop but it's a couple years older than my laptop so I just thought if the PC had this multiplier thing then the laptop should too?

Honestly I'd never heard of this multiplier before I started googling for reasons that my laptop couldn't see my second external hard drive in the dock.

I thought, or perhaps hoping would be a better word, that there would be a bios or windows setting, or at worst a new esata driver to install, in order to turn on this function for the laptop. I can't even find a way to actually verify if my laptop has this multiplier thing or not--I can't find any documentation one way or anotherin in the manual or samsung's website, and I can't find a program to test for it, so I really don't even know if the laptop has it and it just needs to be turned on, or what.

I'm really not that tech savvy so I was hoping someone might have a way for me to verify if this laptop has the multiplier thing, and if so how I would turn it on. I did read the wiki article you linked, though honestly some if it went over my head(like FIS-based).

::

I did follow the link at the bottom of that wiki article, to this link https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features
but I'm unsure how to check which sata hardware I have so that I can look in that list. How would I check my esata port hardware so that I can match it up to that list? Thanks

 

I suspect that the answer lies in the Intel design chipset but features there would also need to be enabled in the BIOS.

John

 

Ok well I looked in the bios, I didn't see anything that seemed to have to do with the esata.

I guess I'm just stuck without the multiplier thing. A bit disappointing, but oh well

Thanks for the help.