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