jerkyjerky

I took the suggestion from dmoldovan and I purchased a SATA to eSATA bracket. The problem of slow boot ups appears to be gone and the drive is now working perfectly. Thanks again dmoldovan for sharing your similar setup with me. So I suppose the ultimate result is that the existing eSATA bracket built into the motherboard is a piece of crap! What a roller coaster ride to get it fixed.

linderman

very interesting and thanks for all who have replied and shared information



happy to hear you have things corrected

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Rob 1

The onboard eSata connector requires a separate driver.

If you had the wrong driver in there, a bad driver, or no driver, it wouldn't work so well.

Did you try deleting it and reinstalling it? How about the motherboard site, is there an updated driver you could try?

Deleted090308

Good news.

dmoldovan

Just a moment.
Regarding the fact that the eSATA has its own drivers:
I did try to use both the drivers on ASUS CD, ASUS site and the latest drivers from www.jmicron.com, and it DID NOT help.
The system kept crashing and/or lagging for periods like 30 seconds. It really is a piece of crap. And the bad thing is (in my opinion) that you can fond it on many boards from almost all manufacturers.
I think they should update the drivers and/or the firmware to make it worth the money.

__________________
Regards,

Dan

jerkyjerky

I agree with dmoldovan. There is no available driver for this specific piece of the motherboard. I checked the same locations as Dan mentions. This is a huge oversight or this eSATA controller is a bonafide piece of crap!!!

Rob 1

That's too bad you guys had trouble like that. I had an Abit P35 board with that driver, and the onboard eSATA connector worked flawlessly.

dmoldovan

Well... I did have a mobo replacement, and the second works just the same way. Which only leads me to the following conclusion: The ASUS engineers DID NOT implement the JMicron JMB 363 controller the right way.

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Regards,

Dan

HaNks49

guys...thank god i found this thread, i think it's confirmed the root of my troubles for now.

i needed some extra external storage and after hearing horrible things about the higher capacity pre-made units failing (mybooks, freeagent pros) i decided to just get an enclosure and make my own external unit (my current WD 250gb mediacentre has been stellar however). as my mobo - the asus P5b - has esata i prioritised that as a feature and thought it would be nice (although not really that essential) to get faster than usb2 speeds as i have the compatible hardware. as some of you now know - big mistake.

did a fair bit of research into the higher capacity drives and enclosures and plumped for a green powered WD 750gb model (best gb for $ ratio on the WD range and the green powered drives run extra cool and silent - useful for an external set-up). got a coolermaster xcraft 360 for the enclosure - awesome hot swappable mechanism and usb2/esata support.

got it going through esata and all was seemingly good. well, my startup times took a dramatic plunge - windows was taking an absolute age at the XP screen - it's also got stuck at this screen while continuously accessing the external drive a few times - forcing me to reset and worrying me that the HD or enclosure was messing up. general performance in windows was also more sluggish and CPU usage up.

knowing that there may be some issues with the mobo/controller drivers i updated the jmicron drivers to the latest version in windows and also flashed on the latest bios for the p5b (probably not a bad idea anyway). after all that start-up was even slower and getting stuck on the loading screen became more persistant.

now after reading this thread i've come to the obvious conclusion - the jmicron JMB36X is a piece of crap and i highly doubt my issues were caused by anything else. switching to an internal sata port using a pci card is not an option as my pci slots are already maxed out. so i'm now using usb2 with the drive and my startup is pretty much instant again, no performance hogging either - big relief. the slightly faster transfer speeds most definitely not worth the hassle with this or similar mobos native esata port.

thanks a lot asus! and thanks for the discussion everyone.

fiat84

Question: With eSata external drives how long should it take for the OS to recognize the true fast speeds of the eSata connection?

Background: Had extreme slowness copying from my external Antec MX-1 with 1TB Sata Samsung drive to a brand new computer with XP Pro SP3, Asus p5k-e MB, Seagate Sata2 HD's for the last few days. The external drive does get recognized in a minute or so before showing up on my new computer.

For the first time kept the external drive connected overnight, the copy process has increased dramatically this morning.

Yesterday the drive speed was really slow copying from the
1) eSata cable connection a 734MB file took 7 minutes to copy to the computer.
2) eSata cable same file copied from computer back to MX-1 took 10 seconds so at least part of it was working correctly.
3) USB 2.0 cable connection the same 734MB file took over 10 minutes to copy 50% so i stopped the copy to the computer since eSata was at least faster.

Left the new computer on all night for the big copy, which failed after awhile. Have the computer setup to run a full Trend virus scan and SpySweeper full scans, both completed without issue overnight.

Started the copy file process again this morning and now it is super fast, just amazing speeds like its a directly connected SATA drive.

Curious is there a best practice for external eSata hard drives? Perhaps reboot with the drive connected, or connect the drive to an already running computer? In my case keeping the MX-1 external drive connected all the time defeats the purpose of moving files around quickly to different locations.

Thanks,

dmoldovan

Well, I don't know what to say...
Something is going wrong with your PC - I mainly suspect the built in e-SATA connector/controller.
My HDD is recognized and set-up by WinVista in about 10 seconds., and from that moment on, the transfer speed is somewhere arround 50MB/sec. With USB the transferr speed is about 20 MB/sec - provided that in BIOS you have enabled USB2.0, AND - very important - HiSpeed (NOT FullSpeed).
But, I want to remind you that my external MX-1 is connected to one of the onboard Intel ICH9R S-ATA connectors, using the backpannel bracket that came with MX-1.
When I used the e-SATA built-in connector, it gave so very strange results.... from random blockings, to bluescreen

Good Luck

__________________
Regards,

Dan

dmoldovan

One solution might be to add a SATA -to- e-SATA bracket onto the back of your PC (if you do have room for one more), and make a setup just like mine: connect the bracket internally to the ICH-SATA port, and it will just rock.

__________________
Regards,

Dan

jerkyjerky

Along the lines of what Dan (dmoldovan) said... Try the internal to external convertion he mentioned... It helped me.

clicker

I had a customer's computer based on the Asus P5KR MoBo.

When she tried attaching a WD MyBook, it gave VERY long startup times. no matter if the drive was connected via FireWire, the original E-SATA conntector in the back, or an internal SATA port (courtesy of a Gigabyte SATA to E-SATA cable).
I even tried installing a PCI SATA controller based on a Silicon Image chip. Every time the drive was connected, we got long startup times, and if it wasn't connected, we got normal bootup.

After long experiments, I took the following step:
Took all the Autorun stuff from the root of the WD drive, and removed them (I actually moved them all to a subfolder, but that's the same).
After that, windows started booting up perfectly!
But, although the BIOS was showing the drive, windows couldn't see it, so I checked the BIOS again, and noticed the SATA connections were configured as AHCI. I changed them to IDE, and everything seems to be working perfectly now.

dmoldovan

AHCI has to do with the ability to use NCQ.
If AHCI is enabled and the SATA drive does not support NCQ, then the drtive will not operate properly (I don't remember the actual issues it will show).

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Regards,

Dan