Here is one thread:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=645766[/i

Do a search on dell and esata.

/Ulf

Thanks Ulf. Yeah, I forgot to search first. Sorry guys.

Also, going with what Bob said....I check the Dell forums and came up with this post:

"Thanks to SmoothSL for posting this in other forums."

I had loads of trouble with eSATA with my ASUS mobo and XP. Fortunately the drive also had a firewire port. I got that to work though XP has plenty of issues with firewire too.

Try connecting 2 FW drives to the same interface. Only one will work. Numerous audio interface boxes from Alesis, PreSonus, and Focusrite had terrible connection problems with firewire. This is on multiple machines. MS has issued many hotfixes for firewire but it still doesn't work right. I ended up with my standby Echo - they wrote their own firewire driver and it seems to be bulletproof.

I also have an XPS420 and tons of eSata drives (at least a dozen). I ultimately found a very stable and effective solution by installing an inexpensive SATA controller card from Addonics along with a free little piece of software called "Hotswap". The card allows eSata drives of all types to be connected and disconnected without any reboots or hangs, and the Hotswap software ensures that the drive is entirely dismounted / unmounted before shutting the drive down and unplugging the SATA cable.

The Dell BIOS and the Dell external SATA connecter / port have NEVER worked properly as far as I am concerned. In particular, if the external Dell eSata port is enabled in the BIOS, then each and every boot of the XPS420 complains if there is not external drive connected. Moreover, there is no apparent "Hotswap" feature supported through this port that I am aware of, thus forcing a reboot every time a drive is connected or removed.

The one and only virtue of the Dell external port I am aware of is that the port can be used to connect a bootable SATA drive which will then, if properly configured in the BIOS, allow for the XPS420 to boot from this external drive instead of any internal drives. This can be very handy for multi-boot users who want to have one external drive with only Vegas and XP, for example, and another boot drive with Vista and Premiere, etc...... I do not believe the Addonics card I purchased has any way to allow a bootable external SATA to act as a bus master.

Hope this is helpful.

Larry

One disclaimer: I have not experimented with the more recent versions of Vista with newer service packs and patches installed. It is entirely possible that some fixes have been provided by Microsoft. I have installed each BIOS upgrade so my BIOS comments should be pretty much up to date.

Larry,

After doing this that I stated earlier:

"Instructions to turn on RAID and to use the eSata port on your XPS 420"

This actually worked and the eSATA port is working. The new drive is there, but things are acting abnormal like you said. Is this what you mean by the XPS complaining? --->http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd173/brizzad79/IMG_2574.jpg

Bootup time takes considerably longer and shows that message every time. But it does eventually continue through and load everything. I'm safely assuming this isn't normal. What can I do from here?

I have a Studio XPS17. Have had problems with eSATA since the beginning. Worked with Dell for awhile. They even replaced the MoBo whivh did not fix the problem. The problem being that the box did not recognize that the drive was connected. I have finally developed a workaround that seems to be working. I have to power up my external eSATA drive first. Wait about 5 seconds then turn the computer on. Most of the time it works. Occasionally it doesn't and I have to do it again. It almost always works by the second time. By the way I am not using the preinstalled eSATA port. Could not get it to work. I am using an Adaptec card.

I don't know if it's a work around, but my slow startup was only if the drives were already turned on before the computer. If I turn them off after I turn the computer off and leave them off while the computer fires up the next time, then it fires up rather quickly as usual. Then I just turn them on as needed.

Brad C - that's not abnormal if you have RAID enabled to see the screen shot you posted - it showing you that you have no RAID arrays defined and the disks you have available to set up a RAID array if you want . By using Cntrl i keyboard strokes you would go to the set up screen for your RAID controller and define the raid type and stripe size etc. The screen times out when you don't choose to set it up and continues with the boot sequence. All this should occur prior to the Windows Boot Logo that shows up while your driver's are loading - if you had a RAID array set up it would show the array and tell you either it's healthy or degraded if there's a problems with it. I have 2 arrays on mine - one on the ICH10R and one on a 3 ware card and both display a RAID screen one after the other - yes it slows the boot up but it should time out and move on quickly - if it pauses for too long for your tastes - there maybe a setting in the bios for you to set the display time for that screen. You should set it to the minimum value for faster boots. Mine are about 2 seconds each. When you only have 1 drive hooked up it's probably not displaying because it can't detect the 2nd drive exists so there's obviously not enough drives to set up RAID on. Either way it's not a problem it's normal, so don't worry.

srode- Thanks for your input. Definitely makes me feel better. I guess the RAID screen isn't really that long but just the entire process of startup can take awhile. My startup time before was actually rather quick. Question: should I just leave the drives on and endure the slower startup times or is it better to leave them off until I need them which is quicker. (if you couldn't tell, I don't have a dedicated work pc yet).

Brad, it won't make any difference either way - just choose which method suits you the best. If you don't use the Esata often and like the faster boot - I would disconnect it until needed.

Took me days to figure out on my Asus mb that EITHER the eSata ports OR internal Sata would work, but not both at the same time. Bios thing.

Get a decent PCI-e ESata card and your problem will be solved.

Tim, which ASUS mobo do you have? I don't want to get into the either/or situation you have found.

TIA

Fred

Some of the mobo manufacturers must be doing some funky things!

On my Gigabyte mobo the eSATA port worked out of the box. for convenience there's another port on the front panel of my Antec 1200 case that simply plugs into one of the SATA ports on the mobo.

I've added two eSATA ports to my Shuttle by simply buying an eSATA bracket and plugging that into the spare ports on the mobo. So long as your mobo has spare SATA ports if the onboard eSATA is giving you grief you don't need to buy a controller, just the riser bracket as SATA and eSATA are the same thing, the eSATA connector is different only in that it adds an earth connection for the cable screen and is supposedly more robust.

Bob.

I gathered my courage and made the ESATA port on my ASUS P5N-E SLI mobo with a Q6600 work! This is running Win XP 32 bit SP3. I did not see the issue reported by Tim, of the internal or external SATAs having to run in isolation.

The magic was getting into the BIOS setup and turning on the jMicron controller. That inspiration started with reading this::

http://forums.hexus.net/help-technical-advisory/157648-external-hdd-wont-work-new-sata-esata-cable.html

The drive is a Western Digital MyBook from Best Buy. Nowhere on the box does it say what speed it runs at. On their website a similar part number says it runs 5400 - 7200 RPM. Whatever that means.

Anyway, the interesting part is that in render tests, with my OS on one internal SATA, input files on a second, and the render output going to a third (all using the mobo SATA controller), whether I render to the internal or external drive, they take virtually the same time. Rendering out to a USB 2.0 drive takes about 20% longer.

I am guessing that I am bound by the seeks on the source drive, my test veg file had about 25 tracks,with a lot of stills, alpha channel stuff, and track and event motion. CPU was running anywhere from 50% to 99% (where it spent most of its time).

In any event, I am happy. The only scary part was when I was using disk manager to reformat the WD, (making it NTFS), it reported the format had failed. I went back to Windows Explorer, saw the red X on the drive letter, right clicked and was asked if I wanted to format, which I did, and everything seems to be just fine.

I must say that I love Bob's suggestion for bringing out some of the spare internal SATA ports. Cool.

Thanks everyone, this forum really does rock!