Vantec eSATA Products Roundup

[Rob Williams]

Are you looking to add eSATA or S-ATA storage to your PC, but your motherboards lacking a few connections? We are taking a look at a slew of Vantec products that take care of all your S-ATA needs.

You can read the review here and discuss it here.

[jangalang]

I have a Vantec NexStar3 external 3.5" enclosure with eSATA and USB interface. The USB interface works perfect but the eSATA does not.

I placed the adapater in the case and plugged the cable in to an available SATA port on the MOBO (brand new MSI KAG9 Neo-2). Then I plugged in the eSATA from the adapter to the external interface, plugged in the power, and turned the drive on. Nothing happened. So, i restarted the computer; looked in the bios (doesn't see it), and let windows start. This time the light goes out on the drive but does not come on at all. I let it sit for a few minutes then shut down the computer to uninstall the drive. What do I need to do in order to get the computer to recognize the external drive via eSATA?

I am using Windows XP hom and only one hard drive (SATA).

Thanks in advance!

[Rob Williams]

I guess it would be wise to just double-check and make sure the drive itself is receiving power. It could be just the enclosure that's turning on, and not the drive itself.

[jangalang]

the drive is receiving power. I am able to use it in USB mode. I can take it off of usb, plug it into eSATA and it will not work at all.

thanks for the reply

[Rob Williams]

I mean, is it receiving power while connected via e-SATA? The drive might receive power via USB because it has built in power, but the e-SATA does not (as far as I recall). When hooked up to e-SATA, I'd just make sure that the drive is spinning (by touching it) and if so, then it sounds like it's a Windows problem.

You might want to download the latest storage drivers for that motherboard off their support site also.

eSATA is almost the same as SATA, with two differences:
1) The cable is redesigned for external use, with shielding and mods to ensure hot pluggability is reliable.
2) The interface is designed for hot pluggability. To work correctly as a hot-plug interface, the drivers must support AHCI.

The reviewer thought the PCMCIA card should have one eSATA and one SATA connector. I don't know how to put this nicely: that's ridiculous. SATA interface would mean the drive needs to get power from... what? Nothing appropriate. SATA is for internal drives. By definition, a laptop with PCMCIA requires an external, eSATA drive.

If you don't have any eSATA drives, you need to run and get a couple of Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives. Last I checked, you could buy a 750G drive with 5 year warranty and USB/Firewire/eSATA interface for $130 or so (buy.com). Using the eSATA interface you get 100% internal drive speed on an external drive. Nice. We use several of these for backups. (At that price, we use external drives as if they were ultra-fast tapes )

Hope that helps!
MrPete