PCIe eSATA Card +Win7 x64

[Edward W. Thompson]

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?

 

[Paul]

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

 

[RJK]

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

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

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

My thanks to you Paul and RJK for your replies. My intention is simply to
use the 'FreeAgent' drive as a data drive, not a boot drive. I do have the
JMicron card installed and Device Manager reports the 'jRaid.sys' v
1.17.45.04 driver installed and the device is operating normally. However,
when booting with the eSata cable connected and the FreeAgent drive 'on',
the drive is not found and the FreeAgent 'Launcher' reports 'no drive
connected'.

Thank you for your explanation of the function of AHCI and the 'southbridge'
as that puts those issues to rest as a possible cause of the 'problem'.

I really don't know what else can be tried. Searching Google shows the
driver installed is the most recent and trying other drivers returns the
message that the driver installed is the 'best' driver available. If I only
had one PCIe card I would suspect a card problem but both the JMicron and
the SIL3112 card exhibit the same characteristics.

Do you have any other avenues I might explore? The issue is not critical
but it is so maddening to have a piece of kit that is supposed to function
in a particular way and simply doesn't.

 

[Paul]

My thanks to you Paul and RJK for your replies. My intention is simply
to use the 'FreeAgent' drive as a data drive, not a boot drive. I do
have the JMicron card installed and Device Manager reports the
'jRaid.sys' v 1.17.45.04 driver installed and the device is operating
normally. However, when booting with the eSata cable connected and the
FreeAgent drive 'on', the drive is not found and the FreeAgent
'Launcher' reports 'no drive connected'.

Thank you for your explanation of the function of AHCI and the
'southbridge' as that puts those issues to rest as a possible cause of
the 'problem'.

I really don't know what else can be tried. Searching Google shows the
driver installed is the most recent and trying other drivers returns the
message that the driver installed is the 'best' driver available. If I
only had one PCIe card I would suspect a card problem but both the
JMicron and the SIL3112 card exhibit the same characteristics.

Do you have any other avenues I might explore? The issue is not
critical but it is so maddening to have a piece of kit that is supposed
to function in a particular way and simply doesn't.

Is the USB interface on the FreeAgent disconnected when you're
attempting to use the ESATA ? The PCB design inside the drive,
may use fairly simple logic for arbitrating control of the
drive, and it could be that the ESATA remains disabled inside,
because the FreeAgent still thinks the user is using USB.

Other than that, it could be an outright failure of the
ESATA interface. Or even a bad cable. Or a plug not fully seated
in the connector. I've read at least one account yesterday, of
an ESATA card, where misalignment of the connector with respect
to the faceplate, was preventing the plug from seating properly.

Paul

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

Is the USB interface on the FreeAgent disconnected when you're
attempting to use the ESATA ? The PCB design inside the drive,
may use fairly simple logic for arbitrating control of the
drive, and it could be that the ESATA remains disabled inside,
because the FreeAgent still thinks the user is using USB.

Other than that, it could be an outright failure of the
ESATA interface. Or even a bad cable. Or a plug not fully seated
in the connector. I've read at least one account yesterday, of
an ESATA card, where misalignment of the connector with respect
to the faceplate, was preventing the plug from seating properly.

Paul

Thanks Paul, your point about the seating of the aSata connection is a good
one and may be relevant. The connector on the card is quite close to the
rib on the case and when I connected I wondered whether the plug was fully
home,. Obviously at the time I thought it was otherwise my post(s) wouldn't
have made sense. I'll remove the screw holding the card in the case to see
whether the plug will insert further,

With respect to your point about the USB connection and eSate connection to
the FreeAgent drive being made at the same time, the answer is no, the drive
is disconnected from USB before making the eSATA connection.

Addressing a failure of the card, that can't be ruled out but it would seem
extraordinary bad luck if both the JMicron and the SIL3112 card were both
faulty. The cable is new but that does not exclude the possibility of there
being a fault. I don't have another so for the meantime I am assuming the
cable is OK.

My thanks once more.