4 bay external enclosure (non raid) connected to esata/sata

4 bay external enclosure (non raid) - connected via esata cable to sata port on mobo.
win 10 19042.631 64bit
asus Z87-a mobo
drivers up to date
Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU3S2
AHCI in bios

Enclosure works fine on usb3.0
trying to free up a usb port and some speed by using esata.
Of course, only shows a drive after pc is powered on and enclosure already on.
Issue i'm having is, i have 4 drives in it.
(1) 1TB, (1) 2TB, (2) 8TB drives.
It only shows a single 8TB drive when esata is connected.

any ideas?

I'm not familar with such devices.

However, the manual's troubleshooting section mentions an eSATA port with a port multipler. It may be that capability isn't present in the Z87- A. (No mention of it in the motherboard manual.)

You can only have 1 drive per SATA port no matter if it is eSATA or SATA.

Well that makes sense then. I wonder with they even put an esata plug on the 4 bay emclosure then.

95GTSpeedDemon said:

Well that makes sense then. I wonder with they even put an esata plug on the 4 bay emclosure then.

Actually, I was mistaken:
Motherboards eSATA port Must support Port Multiplier in order for your computer to recognize multiple hard drive if the unit is connected to eSATA port.

From my research, I don't believe the Asus Z87-A has true eSATA ports. It looks like it has just 6 plain old SATA ports that won't support Port Multiplier.

Yes they are plain sata. I have a cable w/ bracket that has sata to esata, so i installed it.

Guess i will have to make a decision on leaving the drives in the tower or keeping the enclosure on usb.

Thanks for your help!

95GTSpeedDemon said:

Yes they are plain sata. I have a cable w/ bracket that has sata to esata, so i installed it.

Guess i will have to make a decision on leaving the drives in the tower or keeping the enclosure on usb.

Thanks for your help!

Or you use a PCI-e extension card with a real Esata port

syntoh

I have one. I kept getting a screen for a raid driver during boot up. Drove my strange ocd crazy lol so i took it out. Guess its headed back in 😆

Have the driver handy when you do install it.

I have a Mediasonic Pro Box that works great on USB 3.0, it used to work great on e-Sata in Windows 7, but it is now in Windows 10 it is giving me a blue screen and the Internal Power Error. I thought that may be it was my e-Sata cable or my PCI-e card but reading these posts I now realize that my current OS might be the issue.
The box has 2 x 1tb drives, 1 x 2tb drive and 1 x 4tb drive, for a total 8 terabytes.
Any advise would be appreciated.