Hot plugging eSata

[Nermid]

Hey, just reinstalled mac, all working pretty well. Although I can't remove and reinsert my eSata HDD. It is recognised on startup if plugged in, but not if I remove and reinsert it. Is there any way to allow me to do this?

Cheers for absolutely any help.

 

[adrianjgsmith]

Interesting I was just about to post about this, and noticed your setup's almost the same as mine. I'm part way there but not entirely...

Have you tried leaving the eSATA drive off whilst the system boots, then switching it on once you're in OS X? If I do this I can hot swap drives on the eSATA port and get full speed. If I have the drive powered up before powering on the system the drive cannot be ejected, and runs painfully slow.

Also have you added the JMicron SATA and ESATA kexts through MultiBeast?

 

[Nermid]

Will give this a go now. And no I haven't added any JMicron SATA or ESATA kexts, wasn't sure which were required, although I assume just the ones labeled eSATA and SATA in the JMicron list. I'll give them a go now too.

Cheers!

 

[Nermid]

Okay, so mine works now how I want it too. Which is it can be plugged in at startup or after. Then ejected when not needed to transfer files from elsewhere. After plugging back in it isn't recognised instantly like in Windows. It needs to be remounted, so currently I go to the Disk Utility and right click on the drive and click Mount. Then it's available as a drive like the internal drives (but doesn't get an orange icon on the desktop like usb connected external drives).

This might help, you may already know this mind...

Cheers again

 

[adrianjgsmith]

Glad to help.

It still seems wierd on my system that if the eSATA drive's on prior to boot it runs so slowly and can't be ejected. Almost as if booting with it connected makes the system think the drive's internal SATA?

EDIT: Further to that, if I let the eSATA drive go to sleep, when I access it again it will be back in a very slow-running state. A lot of glitches going on here.

 

[Nermid]

Okay, so my eSata drive has just stopped appearing, completely randomly. Can't see it when it's plugged in even in the Disk Utility, haven't tried restarting yet mind. But clearly still an issue.

 

[adrianjgsmith]

Is it showing up in System Profiler under Serial-ATA (it would be among your internal hard drives if it's there)?

 

[Nermid]

It wasn't, no. But since I restarted it hasn't given me the same issue. Hopefully it'll be fine now.

 

[jjstokes]

I had some issues with SATA drives not showing as hot-swappable orange icons. Just make sure you only have one of the kexts installed, you don't need both the JMicron SATA and eSATA kexts.

After I deleted the regular SATA kext and kept only the eSATA one, everything worked out fine. I can load hot-swappable drives on my internal SATA ports and my eSATA ports.

 

[adrianjgsmith]

After I deleted the regular SATA kext and kept only the eSATA one, everything worked out fine. I can load hot-swappable drives on my internal SATA ports and my eSATA ports.

Out of interest, have you swapped between eSATA drives whilst booted in OS X? I can plug in a drive and mount and unmount it all I want, but if I try to introduce a different drive on the port, it falls over. Wierdly, once I unplug a drive, it still looks as if it's connected but unmounted in Disk Utility:

I'm using the 3rd party eSATA kext from Multibeast 4.0.1