Re: PCIe eSATA Card +Win7 x64
- From: "RJK" <nosuch@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 11:26:48 -0000
"Paul" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:hd5usm$kqf$1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Edward W. Thompson wrote:
I have been trying to install a eSata PCIe card into my machine (Gigabyte
GA-P45-DS3 MB) to drive my Seagate FreeAgent external HDD. So far I have
tried two cards, one with a SIL3112 chipset and the other with a
JMicron360 chipset. Both cards appear to install and drivers loaded (x64
drivers). Device Manager indicates the cards are functional. The problem
is the Seagate FreeAgent drive is not recognized. The drive functions
without problems from a USB port. Although not relevant I have four
internal HDDs connected to SATA ports.
Scanning Google gives rise to many comments on the problem of getting
PCIe eSATA cards to function correctly but to date I have not seen a
definitive answer as to how to get the card to function. There is an
indication that AHCI needs to be loaded and I have tried this. It seems
that AHCI drivers can be loaded after the OS by changing the value in the
Registry of msachi (HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msachi) to 0,
then to reboot and enable ACHI in the Bios. When I did this (Msachi was
already at 0, which seemed strange as the indication was that it should
have been at 1), WIN 7 x64 stalled during reboot. As an aside it took
several minutes to get past loading the ACHI drivers which seemed wrong.
I have reverted to running the drive from USB.
That's the story to date. Has anyone any experience of successfully
installing aPCIe eSATA card and can give some guidance to the procedure?
So are you trying to use the FreeAgent as your boot drive ? Or is the
FreeAgent going to be a data drive, while your internal drive
continues to be the boot drive ?
The recipe for changing an AHCI setting, implies you're changing the
Southbridge SATA interface from some other state, to AHCI. So the
recipe you're following, is intended for situations where you
sought to operate all the Southbridge interfaces in AHCI mode.
It would be suitable, if the boot drive was connected to the
Southbridge, and for some reason, you needed the AHCI driver
so a second Southbridge SATA port could be used to hot-plug
to a second SATA drive. The registry change is presumably intended
to get Win7 to use the AHCI driver, so that the whole Southbridge
uses it. And then, the second SATA device would be controlled by
that driver.
This is an independent issue from making AHCI work on the Jmicron360.
The Jmicron360 is not part of your Southbridge. For that card, you
would likely control it via a driver choice. As near as I can tell here,
the driver file is jraid.sys, and presumably covers both RAID operation
and AHCI on the Jmicron chip. If you don't use the utility to add RAID
metadata to a disk, the disk connected to the Jmicron chip would likely
be treated as AHCI (non-RAID).
ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw/jmb36x/XP_Vista_Win7/
Windows 7 probably has a lot of drivers built in, and
it may have already applied a driver for the JMB360.
Perhaps you could check the properties of the device
manager entry, and see what driver file is being used.
In terms of procedures, say you thought the AHCI driver wasn't fully
working, and hot-plug was broken. Then, you'd turn on the
FreeAgent power, with the USB cable disconnected, and the ESATA
cable connected to the Jmicron card. Then, start the PC, and
allow it to boot from your regular boot drive. Next, go to
either Device Manager, and see if a new storage device is there.
Or go to Disk Management, and see if something has shown up there.
Occasionally, there are people who have disk drives, where
hot-plug doesn't work, and yet the drive works if it is present
and detected at powerup. That is usually a driver/settings issue.
In the case of the Jmicron, I don't know if there is even an
option to install a broken driver. The download does include
an IDE item, but that might be something that gets installed for
one of the other chips, like a 363. As near as I can tell, the
only file is the jraid.sys . So it should just... work.
Of your two card choices, in this case, I'd try the Jmicron
product first.
Paul
In case it's slightly relevant, as far as the SIL card is concerned, a few
months ago I fitted/connected a 3rd SATAII hard disk, to PCI-e x1 SIL3132
card into my Asus M3N78 based machine, and had to fight to get the correct
driver installed. i.e I had to "update driver" from within Device Manager,
after digging out Properties for the detected SCSI device, and browsing
through the drivers on the CD - the one that was reccommended and looked as
though it was the correct one, ("IDE" in the filename i think), was NOT,
....one had to select a "RAID" type driver - or, if memory serves, the
Silicon Image CD directory / driver with "raid" in the filename - whereupon
it installed beautifully - even though I don't use a RAID setup !
As an aside, when I rummage in Device Manager and look at it's details, hd
is reported as running in UDMA 6 mode but, "Host Link Speed" and "Device
Link Speed" are reported as "Generation 1 (1.5 Gb/s)." Hard-disk
benchmark software reveals this to be false. i.e. Transfer Rate: 7.304
MB/s - Copy File Bench ended / copying 1gb file from internal hard disk to
hard disk connected to SIL card.
So, in short, the Silicon Image driver installation instructions leave a lot
to be desired !
regards, Richard
.
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- PCIe eSATA Card +Win7 x64
- From: Edward W. Thompson
- Re: PCIe eSATA Card +Win7 x64
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