January 21st, 2010
What to do when eSata doesn’t work on a Dell Latitude E6500 – Win7 or Vista
I ran into an interested problem with my month-old Dell Latitude E6500. It comes with an eSata connection which i was eager to take advantage of for high speed backups and disk cloning. I discovered that there is a lot more to getting this port working with an external drive (in my case a 1.5TB Western Digital MyBook).
There are a few things you’ll need to conquer to get eSata functionality out of the E6500. Although quite annoying, the 50+megabytes per seconds you’ll be able to transfer at are worth the wait.
1) Intel Matrix driver and software must be updated.
The SiL5744 chipset requires updated software from the dell support site. Download the software here.
2) You must make a registry change (YIKES)
Microsoft has directions to make a registry change necessary to run eSata.
3) You must enable the correct SATA support in the BIOS
The E6500′s BIOS is initially set to use IRRT. The likely reason for this is that IRRT supports RAID1 setups, which in my opinion aren’t going to be widely used even in corporate environments. Tt must be changed to AHCI for an external drive to successfully connect. Some registry changes are needed to keep the system able to boot. (if you make a mistake you can switch back to IRRT to boot again.
4) CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOUR CABLE FITS THE CONNECTIONS – MODIFICATIONS MAY BE NEEDED.
I bought a standard Belkin eSata cable at Staples for around 20 bucks. Turns out the plastic molded around each of the male ends goes too far down the plug, causing it to not actually make a connection. I cut about 5mm off with a razor blade and it made all the difference. This problem is well known (toms hardware article) and not too obvious to the average consumer.
I put a lot of the blame on Western Digital for making the case on their MyBook so damn thick over the ports. They’re no way most cables will fit into this drives without some modification. I would also recommend looking into other eSata drives, as I was less impressed that a $175 external drive came with demo/trial software. Disappointing considering how much great open source software they could have bundled with it.
Some Additional Resources
