External SATA (eSATA) is a great idea that gives you the advantage of USB/IEEE 1394 (convenience) coupled with the advantage of internal SATA (high speed). We were excited to discover that our new Core i7 computers from HP have built in eSATA ports. That makes adding a hard drive a much easier task with no need to open the case. Just plug and play. Or so I hoped.

I already happened to have a Western Digital 1 TB bare drive sitting around, still new in its bubble wrap (we had ordered it for another system and then didn’t need it). So after a bit of research, I ordered a ThermalTake Max 4 Active Cooling drive enclosure from Amazon. It wasn’t the least expensive enclosure, but it got very good reviews. It arrived today, and I was eager to get my new drive installed and have another terabyte of storage space at my fingertips.

The housing was lighter than it looked in the photos, but appears to be well made. What should have been a five minute task, though, took about twenty because of all the annoying tiny screws that have to be dealt with. First, I made the mistake of removing the screws from the wrong side, exposing the bottom instead of the top of the case because there was lettering on the bottom as well as the top. So, after finally getting the four little screws out, I had to put them back. Getting them lined up correctly was a pain. Then I got the top section off, and there were more screws inside to unscrew; these are the ones that hold the brackets into which the hard drive goes. Took those out and the drive fits easily into the brackets. Then you snap the brackets back into the rails and slide the drive down so that the eSATA connector goes into the socket. No problem there. Now it’s time to put the screws back. Be sure you don’t get the two different types of screws mixed up (the ones that go into the brackets vs. the ones that hold the top of the housing on). They are almost the same, but the two that go in the bracket are slightly longer than the four that go into the housing.

Thermaltake Max 4 drive housing – supports USB or eSATA connection

Once I had it all assembled, I plugged in the power cord and plugged in the eSATA cable (which was included with the housing), then plugged the other end of the eSATA cable into my computer and  … nothing. Didn’t show up in My Computer, didn’t show up in Disk Manager, no “installing device drivers” message, just … nothing. Okay, maybe you need to reboot since it’s SATA. Nope, that didn’t help either. So I started doing some web research and found that many people who were buying external SATA drives were having the same problem. They said their drives worked fine with the USB connection, but wasn’t recognized with the eSATA connection. Some of them said you need to set the SATA controller to AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode in the BIOS. So I rebooted again, went into Setup and switched it from RAID mode to AHCI.

Went through the BIOS startup, went through the boot menu, got to the Windows 7 startup “fireflies” screen and then … reboot. The computer was in one of those vicious loops where it keeps rebooting itself before going into the operating system. Well, I also have Vista installed, and Tom suggested I try booting into it. Guess what – it booted into Vista with no problem, and I got a message that it was installing AHCI drivers. And lo and behold, when I opened up Disk Manager, there was the new drive, all 1000 unformatted GB of it. I had to first initialize it, and then I partitioned it into two volumes and quick formatted them in NTFS. Okay, that’s nice, but I have no intention of working in Vista.

So I tried booting into Win7 again. No go, same loop. Went back to Setup and changed the SATA controller setting back to RAID. Now I could boot into Win7 with no problem. And now my new partitions were showing up in My Computer. No problem with the drive since, and yes, it’s definitely a good deal faster than USB.

 
There’s my new eSATA drive (partitions F and G) in Windows 7 – after I initialized the disk and formatted the partitions in Vista

So I don’t know if it’s a glitch in Windows 7 or if it’s an anomaly that’s peculiar to my computer, but all’s well that ends well and I’m glad I kept that old Vista installation in a dual boot configuration.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com