Esata not detecting all drives ( LaCie 2 Big )

farrellart · 12 Apr 2021

Hello everyone,

I have a LaCie 2 Big external hard drive ( x2 500MB drives set to JBOD @1TB ) for my 3rd tier back up for O/S image and major artwork projects/VRGalleries(unreal)/commissions.

I have moved the LaCie device from my Art studio to the home set-up, in my art studio the LaCie device was connected via USB and the two drives were detected, when I connect the device to my home set-up Win 10 pro (19042.867) via ESata only one of the two drives are visible ( always the right-hand drive ), the weird thing happens when I connect via usb when all the external drives show up.

Is this a limitation of Esata and/or a limitation of the Asus p9x79 pro M/B which is aging but still fully functional for Photoshop/Unity/Unreal?

hsehestedt · 12 Apr 2021

I'm taking an educated guess here:

I believe that in order to see multiple devices via the eSATA port, that port has to support the "Port Multiplier" capability which not all do.

I'll research further and let you know if I determine anything more.

hsehestedt · 12 Apr 2021

Bingo. Take a look at this:

eSATAp - Wikipedia.

Search for "Port multiplier". Note this statement:

If it has port multiplier support, an eSATAp port allows a user to connect to a multi-bay NAS (network attached storage) machine with multiple hard disks (HDD) using one eSATA cable.

So, in all likelihood, your eSATA port is missing this support. You may want to check the specs for your system, but this is almost certainly the cause.

EDIT:

Yet more info on the matter:

Port Multipliers | SATA-IO (sata-io.org)

farrellart · 12 Apr 2021

hsehestedt said:

I'm taking an educated guess here:

I believe that in order to see multiple devices via the eSATA port, that port has to support the "Port Multiplier" capability which not all do.

I'll research further and let you know if I determine anything more.

Thank you hsehestedt, as far as I can tell there is nothing in the Bios about Esata. USB seems snappy, so I am using that for now, any help with Esata is greatly appreciated, maybe it wasn't fully designed as a JBOD device, Perhaps in RAID it might utilize both drives via Esata, but, that will mean a reformat and data loss.

EDIT: it would appear that I didn't 'confirm' my JBOD selection on the back properly when I was messing with the modes, it's a little bit fiddly with an 'unclear' dial on the back...and then you HAVE to confirm the selection while the drives are on.... so now both drives are visible using esata.