As noted in a prior post, I have had issues getting eSATA drives recognized off the motherboard eSATA connections, as have a lot of other people.  In my case, the motherboard is the well respected Asus P6TD Deluxe but I could not get a Western Digital MyBook to be seen at all.

I had the same issue on the Mac Pro with the new Drobo S so I bought two different eSATA PCI-e cards, one for each machine.  The one in the Mac is the Sonnet Tempo E2 and the one in the Windows box is a LaCie SATA II 2E.

Both systems work great, but to focus on the Windows issue; the BIOS on the Asus Board immediately recognized the card as a SATALink and enabled it.  Windows 7 needed to start up completely without the drive connected to install its own device drivers.  I’m glad it did as the drivers in the box from LaCie were pretty old, and once again the Microsoft drivers did the job.  As soon as Windows told me my device had been installed, I powered up the WD drive and Windows 7 found it and mounted it properly.  Now instead of FireWire 400 I have an eSATA connection at 3GB/s.  So if you are thinking about an eSATA drive for your Windows 7 machine, factor in the requirement for an eSATA card, about $50 and things should be good to go.

Well I was reminded tonight why I prefer the Macintosh over other platforms.  I built a new machine running Windows 7 to host my virtual machine repository.  Since I wanted maximum speed for the connection, I bought a Western Digital MyBook Home 1.5TB during one of the Boxing Week sales because it had eSATA.  It also has USB2 and FireWire 400.  I really dislike USB2 as a disk connection because when the volume gets up there it’s just so darn pokey.  FireWire 400 is better but neither the drive, nor the machine (yet) has a FireWire 800 port.  Hence eSATA.  3GB/s should be more than fast enough. 

The drive is inexpensive and while nowhere near the speed of a Caviar Black in a third party enclosure, the price was right.  But there’s an issue.  I’ve learned by plenty of web research that Windows 7 consistently misses seeing eSATA connected drives.  I’ve posted questions to WD and to Microsoft but see that I’m not the only person with the issue, it’s not unique to WD drive enclosures and there is apparently no solution out there.

Now I still believe strongly in Windows 7, if you must run Windows.  But don’t expect any good news for connecting external SATA drives.  Internal drives work fine.  If I get this fixed or find a solution I will update the post, but in the interim, save yourself pain and anguish and don’t bother trying to use Windows 7 with an eSATA device.  By the way, I have exactly the same drive plugged into my Mac Pro as my Time Machine target and it works very well indeed.Tags: windows 7 does not see esata drives, issue with eSata and Windows 7, external drives not found by Windows 7

In a prior post I mentioned the very useful aTVflash toolset for the Apple TV. Some might say that the Apple TV isn’t really that hot as a media server and prefer to use Plex or something like it on a Mac Mini.

aTVflash was recently updated to allow you to move the iTunes library on the Apple TV to an external disk attached to the USB port on the Apple TV. Wait a minute you say, that USB port is disabled. Not with aTV Flash it isn’t.

One of my frustrations with the AppleTV was the 160GB drive. I keep my music, TV shows and movies in my regular iTunes library that is stored on my Drobo. Unfortunately I was having to constantly edit which movies were on the AppleTV because of disk space limitations.

Not any more. I attached an external drive case with a fast WD Caviar Green 1.5TB drive via the USB2 port and then used the aTVflash function to move the library. It took a bit of time to move everything but once done I could sync all my movies to the AppleTV and still have over 1TB of free space. No performance hits, no jitter and it acts as a backup copy of my iTunes library because I can always SSL into the system via the aTVflash capability.

So if you like the idea of the Apple TV as a media server, especially if you want to use Handbrake to make hard disk copies of your purchased and self created DVDs, using aTVflash makes it easy. And lastly, aTVflash does not void the Apple TV warranty.

Well this past two weeks was a bit traumatic for the whole storage thing. I’ve spent a good deal of money on LaCie external drives over the years, liking their aluminum cases and readily available FireWire 800 connectivity. I dislike USB2 for storage devices, it’s just way slow compared to FireWire of either the 400 or 800 variants and while I have one external eSata drive, some drives aren’t recognized by the backplane connector extension on the Mac Pro.

Over the course of two days, with no spikes or brownouts, at least one of the drives in the LaCie Terabyte externals (2 different ones) decided it was time to die. I’ve had this happen before and when I have replaced the dead drives with good quality WD Caviars or Seagate Barracudas they’ve been ok for a while longer. One of the LaCie drives was still as new and the other had started life as a 500GB but had been upgraded to 1TB when one of the internal drives crapped out about a year and a half ago. As the drives were ATA I had limited choices available. Anyway they both died within two days of each other. Since that’s four LaCie drives in four years, I won’t be buying anymore. But I am tired of the daisychain and the WD external drives are also flaky.

I could have bought an external FW800 case and loaded my own drives, but bit the bullet and followed the advice of Scott Bourne, Leo Laporte, Frederick Johnson, Cali Lewis and a bunch of other folks and bought a Drobo. Tiger Direct had the FW800 model on sale so with two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives, taxes and under $7 for shipping, I have replaced the external Seagates with a single Drobo that still has two bays free for under $930.

Everything you hear about setting up the Drobo is true. It’s fast, simple and you are up and running in under 30 minutes. The most confusing thing is setting up the format. The trick here is to set the volume size as big as you think you might get, not what you actually have today. So even though I have only 2 x 1.5TB drives and pretty much all of one goes to redundancy, I set the format for 8TB or 4 x 2TB drives. Get info shows 8TB space but the Drobo dashboard shows the actual storage available. The reason to set the format size to the largest probable, is so when you add drives or replace drives with bigger drives, you don’t end up with two separate partitions. I like seeing the Drobo as one giant drive.

You may have read stuff about the Drobo being slower than a direct attached FW800 drive. My own experience dropping gigs of video on it is that it is much quicker than either the LaCie FW800 drives or the WD FW800 I used to have. I don’t find it slower at all in real world practical experience.

All my data is protected automatically, I didn’t need a RAID card or to do software (uggh) RAID on the Mac Pro. It just works.

At some point if I wish I can add a DroboShare and connect the drive to my network but I won’t be doing that I don’t think since the connection from the Drobo to the DroboShare is USB2, which by now you will have gathered I don’t think much of.

Drobo works with Mac OS X, most all Linux distros and Windows. Although my Drobo is nowhere near full, I’m actually looking forward to shoving another drive into it just to watch that protected storage come online.

For more information head on over to http://www.drobo.com

UPDATED October 2009
Now filled with 1.5TB drives and have moved all my music, movies and TV Shows over to the Drobo. It’s awesome.