First, my SATA controller is onboard since I have an ASUS P4P800
Motherboard. I don't see anything listed as SATA or SCSI, but I do see
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers and my drive is showing
under the second Primary IDE Channel. When I open the properties of the
drive for my internal, I am offered to uncheck Write Behind Caching, but
that is it. For my external, it offers whatever I want.

Try installing these chipset drivers and see if they help:
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=1671

You may have an old version of the drivers that don't fully support SATA
Storage. Also, you can try Intel Application Accelerator to make
changes to your drive instead of Windows. You can get that he
ftp://aiedownload.intel.com/df-suppo.../iaa23_enu.exe

----
Nathan McNulty

Chris S wrote:
OK, good - so SCSI is the clue here. The funny thing is ... I have
two computers at home and one at work that I'm setting up in this
manner, different mobo brands, different OSs, different SATA cards,
etc and they are all showing up with SCSI controllers.

So please tell me, Nathan: in device manager, on your system, where
DOES the SATA controller show up - what label, etc? Knowing that
would help!

At home, I have an Asus P4PE and an Asus P4B533, both with Win 2K.
Had 'latest' chipset drivers as of a year ago, but I'll check again.
One has a built-in Promise Fastrack SATA controller which I quit using
because it didn't pass SMART info.

At work, I have a Dell Dimension, very new (3.4 GHz), no idea about
chipset drivers but I'll see what I can download from dell. This is
Win XP Pro.

The home machines have the Adaptec/Silicon Image SATA card, and the
work machine has the Maxtor/Promise SATA card.

In device manager, the SATA cards show up under the heading of 'SCSI
and RAID controlllers' - on all three machines, two different OS's,
two SATA card brands!

So knowing what I 'should' see in device manager will give me
something to aim for!

Thanks!

On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 01:17:35 -0700, Nathan McNulty
wrote:


Things showing up as SCSI is just odd. I have nothing like this on my
system. I would go into Device Manager (Start-Run-devmgmt.msc) and
remove these devices. Install the latest chipset drivers and reboot.
If after installing the latest chipset drivers and a clean configuration
of the drives it doesn't work, I would try a fresh install of XP as a
last resort if possible.

----
Nathan McNulty


Chris S wrote:

Well, I'm stumped. I just took an old 10 gig maxtor drive (ata) and
put it in my SATA enclosure (which does pata/sata conversion). The
drive shows up no problem. I formatted it as FAT32, but still, the
two 'optimize' options on the 'policies' button are grayed out.

This is somewhat consistent with my other tests, which have included
'native' SATA drives (though I can't afford to re-format the 'real'
sata drive at the moment).

I even took my USB memory stick, and was able to format it as NTFS,
and it still had the two 'optimize' options available on the
'policies' tab, so NTFS/FAT don't appear to be the deciding factor
here.

The essence of the problem seems to be that my two SATA cards (one
Adaptec/Silicon Image card, one Maxtor/Promise card) present
themselves as SCSI adapters, and thus, disks connected to them are
treated as SCSI disks.

Do your SATA adapters and associated drives show up as SCSI devices?

The only other variables I can think of are the specific settings in
the 'disk management' applet; I could make it 'basic' or 'dynamic'
(I've chosen both at various times, seems to make no difference),
primary or extended (think I've tried both);

I just spent $150 on a bunch of 6 foot external SATA cables, and
internal sata connector posts (to provide 'female' sata connectors on
back of computer) so I'd like to proceed with this, but at this point
I'm running out of ideas!

Thanks!

On Thu, 02 Sep 2004 00:06:05 -0700, Nathan McNulty
wrote:



I will try to help as best as I can. I believe you need to have the
drive formatted as FAT32 to use Optimize for Quick Removal. This is
simply what I choose to use for my SATA drive. I would update the
chipset drivers, format the drive again, and then set the options right
there. XP will not format FAT32 larger than 32GB unless you use
something different to format it. I simply connected the drive
internally and used a Windows 98 Bootdisk. Your method may vary

----
Nathan McNulty


Chris S wrote:


And still more info ... I just plugged my SATA drive into my XP Pro
office computer (my home computer mentioned below is Windows 2000),
which has a Maxtor SATA/150 PCI Card (which is a promise device under
the covers). Going to the properties of the drive in this
configuration, I do see a 'policies' tab, but when I select it, the
two 'optimize...' options are grayed out, and the 'Optimize for
performance' is the option selected. So I can't change it to 'optimze
for quick removal' ....

Stranger and stranger ...


On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 21:44:24 GMT, Chris S
wrote:




Well, the plot thickens, as they say ... on my home system, when I
plug in my SATA drive, and go to it's properties (the same place where
I saw 'policies' on the USB drive below), I only see 'Disk Properties'
and 'SCSI Properties'. On the 'Disk Properties' tab, there is one
option - Write Cache enabled; it's grayed out and unchecked. On the
'SCSI Properties', there are two options: 'Disable tagged queueing'
and 'Disable synchronous transfers'. Both are available (i.e., not
grayed out), and bot are not checked.

So the bottom line is, I don't have the 'policies' tab in the first
place, which is where you are going to set the various optimization
choices. How come my SATA drives are being treated as 'SCSI', while
yours are not? Is that the root cause here?

My controller is an Adaptec 'SATA Connect' card, which shows up, under
device manager, as a SCSI device 'Adaptec Serial ATA 1205SA Host
Controller', and it's control panel applet says it's a Sil 3112 Rev 2
device.

Thanks!

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:31:29 -0700, Chris S
wrote:




Thanks Nathan. Is the setting of FAT32 a pre-condition to getting the
'Optimize for Quick Removal', or am I formatting as FAT32 for another
reason? I don't believe I have any compelling reason to go with NTFS
with these particular drives so if that's the trick, I'll certainly go
with it.

I just popped in a USB memory stick, and went to the 'policies' tab,
and the two choices/explanations are as follows:
1) "Optimize for Quick Removal - This setting disables write caching
on the disk and in Windows, so you can disconnect this device without
using the Safe Removal icon"
2) "Optimize for performance - This setting enables write caching in
Windows to improve disk performance. To disconnect this device from
the computer, click the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the taskbar
notification area".

So ... this suggests it's perfectly OK to go with either option, it's
just that, if you choose 'performance', you need to 'safely remove'
the device first. Is the very appearance of that 'safely remove
hardware' icon in the taskbar restricted to FAT32 devices?

I'll go home and play with this for a while and report back ...
thanks!





On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:01:30 -0700, Nathan McNulty
wrote:




You have a couple of options. First would be to format the drive as
FAT32, which you may or may not want to do. Second, you will need to
change the way the device is set up. Connect the device, open Device
Manager, double click on the hard drive in question, click the Policies
Tab, then set it to Optimize for Quick Removal. I use FAT32 on my
removeable SATA drives and set them to Optimize for Quick Removal, but
you may be able to do it differently.

----
Nathan McNulty


Chris S wrote:



SATA drives are theoretically hot swappable; the power and data
connectors are designed for 'hot' removal, with ground wires
connecting first, and the interface is designed to deal with the
various surge issues - this is well known.

I've used several USB 2.0 external drives, and before you remove them,
you are supposed to 'stop' them; presumably to flush any delayed
writes that may be in progress, etc.

But when I plug in a SATA drive, it does not show up as a device to be
'safely removed' in the 'Safely Remove Hardware' applet that shows up
if I plug in a USB device.

I've done some tests; when I plug in a SATA drive (a data drive,
obviously, not a boot drive), a new hard drive shows up, no problem.
I can read and write to this drive, no problem. And if I unplug it,
or power it down, the drive letter simply disappears - no error
messages or warnings whatsoever. All sounds good.

HOWEVER, I could not find a file that I had written to the drive.
This has all the markings of a write-cached file not being written to
the device. So it occurred to me that, somehow, I should be able to
'stop', or 'dismount', or otherwise 'software disconnect' this drive
before I actually remove it. But the only relevant option I can find
for the device is to disable write caching - is that what I should be
doing? I'd rather not do that as it will generally slow down
performance, but if it is the only way to guarantee data integrity,
that's what I'll do.

I've seen posts from others that indicate this is a regular practice,
so I just wondered, how do I guarantee my files have been 'flushed'
before removing the drive?

Thanks!
For email, send to chris at panties domain dot com, Remove panties and replace domain with attbi.

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