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Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

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superboyac:
On the new computer I built this year:
See here

I have just attached my new external hard drive enclosure, and it detects one of the drives and not the other.  How come?

Internally, I have 3 hard drives and a DVD drive using a sata connector.  Externally, I have two more connected through esata that eventually goes to a sata port on the motherboard.

How come it's not detecting my second external drive?  For summary:
3 internal SATA hard drives
1 internal SATA DVD drive
2 external SATA drives (one is not being detected).

On the motherboard itself, I have plugs for up to 8 SATA drives.  6 of them are bunched together for RAID purposes I'm guessing.  I also have 2 of them together in another part of the board.  These two are the ones that are connected to the eSATA connectors on the outside of the case.  If the motherboard can support all this, why can't the computer see the last one?  Also, I'm not running any kind of RAID array.  Each drive does it's own independent thing.

mouser:
my limited experience with motherboard recognizing large numbers of drives (6 qualifies as large for a desktop) is that it can be tricky to diagnose.

i would suggest your first task would be to try various configurations and narrow down a little more what's not working.

in other words, if you disconnect the first external hd in the enclosure, is the second one recognized?

Target:
seems obvious, but first thing I'd be looking at was the BIOS...

4wd:
This sounds similar to a problem one of the guys at our LAN meetings was having with, IIRC, the same board.

The two separate SATA are the Gigabyte +2 SATA controller and, again IIRC, they would only work in some form of RAID mode - he couldn't run separate drives on it in a non-RAID configuration, which he wasn't really happy about since he wanted the interfaces for purely non-RAID storage.  So he was left with two interfaces he couldn't fully use.

My suggestion is try running your eSATA off of the 'normal' lot of 6 SATA connectors and see if they are detected.

EDIT: I'm not entirely sure if I got my facts right but I do know that he couldn't use those two ports for normal 'stand-alone' drive configuration.  I'll check on Friday - it's LAN night :)

Another EDIT: Then again, maybe you can set the GSATA controller to IDE mode, you'll lose your hot-plug facility, (AHCI), on them but can use them as normal ports.  You could then move 2 drives from the 6-pack and set the mode on the 6-pack to AHCI and use 2 of them for your eSATA.

superboyac:
It works now, here is what happened:
--The 6-pack connectors are Intel based.  The other 2 are GSata (whatever that means) based on Gigabyte (so 4wd, you're right).
--i read on another forum that there have been problems with the Gsata.  i didn't find out what the solution was.
--I connected all 6 hard drives (including the eSata bracket connectors) to the 6-back since those are supposed to work better.
--I moved my DVD drive to the Gsata connector.

Everything works fine now.  There's only one minor consenquence/inconvenience from all of this.  Apparently, the computer won't recognize the eSata as an external connection is my external connection manager software "USB Safely Remove".  Before, it did.  Now it recognizes my DVD drive as an external connection.  I guess whatever is connected to the GSata is considered an external device.  But it's no big deal I guess.

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