Anyone have experience with this SATA/PATA/media reader?

[Gray_Area]

I got one of these recently. (Not from this seller.)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IDE-SATA-HDD-HARD-DRIVE-DOCK-STATION-USB-HUB-READER-Supports-2-5-3-5-SATA-IDE-/280878513094?pt=US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item4165a9fbc6



In XP and Vista, SATA or PATA, it will see OS partitions/drives, but not data. Not sure what to do here....

[lilshawn]

check your jumpers on the PATA. sometimes some need the drive to be set to cable select (CS) to work right

as for SATA, perhaps it only supports sata 1 speeds. sometimes there is a jumper to set the drive to enable or disable 150MS/s speeds.

check in your drive management in the control panel and see if the drive is being assigned a letter. if the drive had previously been assigned a letter and the system is using that letter, it won't assign a new letter to the drive. you will have to manually assign a letter (right click and change drive letter or path)

[kahlid74]

check in your drive management in the control panel and see if the drive is being assigned a letter. if the drive had previously been assigned a letter and the system is using that letter, it won't assign a new letter to the drive. you will have to manually assign a letter (right click and change drive letter or path)

This is most likely your culprit.  If you can see the one partition on the drive but not the second, your cable, reader and drive are working perfectly.  You need to go into Computer management, then Disk management and identify if the second partition is either not being assigned a drive letter (what lilshawn says above) or if the partition is seen as foreign and just needs to be initiated.

[Gray_Area]

None of this is working for data PATA drives. In Disk Management, it doesn't see anything there, so it *can't* do anything.

[quintinbiker]

I know that someone mentioned it, but the only thing i can think of doing is setting the jumper on the back of the hardrive to cs not master not slave

[kahlid74]

None of this is working for data PATA drives. In Disk Management, it doesn't see anything there, so it *can't* do anything.

So, PATA drives have this unique phenomenon I like to call stupidity.  In my experience with PATA drives and external systems like this you need to do the following:

• Turn your computer off.
• Plug the Driver reader into the computer
• Plug the Hard drive into the drive reader
• Turn the drive reader on
• Turn your computer on
• Go to computer management and it should then be seen

If that doesn't work I'd look for different drives/try it in a different machine.  SATA drives have always worked for me plug and play but PATA I've always needed to do the shut down/boot up with it already on to be recognized.

[Gray_Area]

None of this is working for data PATA drives. In Disk Management, it doesn't see anything there, so it *can't* do anything.

So, PATA drives have this unique phenomenon I like to call stupidity.  In my experience with PATA drives and external systems like this you need to do the following:

• Turn your computer off.
• Plug the Driver reader into the computer
• Plug the Hard drive into the drive reader
• Turn the drive reader on
• Turn your computer on
• Go to computer management and it should then be seen

If that doesn't work I'd look for different drives/try it in a different machine.  SATA drives have always worked for me plug and play but PATA I've always needed to do the shut down/boot up with it already on to be recognized.

Not sure I tried connection and power-up of device before system power-up. Should the jumper still be CS?

[Gray_Area]

Still no dice on this. It was one of the first things to get going in the system tray, but still says 'insert disc into G:' . I changed the drive letter to I, and it still says 'no media'.  Mmmmmm, looks like a bum purchase.

[quintinbiker]

Is the hardrive working? did you test it outside the card reader?

can't remember now who mentioned about shutting down then connecting the PATA drive, as far as my knowledge goes, everything on the multi reader should be hot swoppable?

[lilshawn]

maybe try throwing another drive into it and go through the formatting and partitioning... try dumping some data on it and see if it is usable.

if it's still doesn't work properly it's probably bum.

[DillonFoulds]

Alternatively, RTFM. Maybe that cradle requires PATA in Master mode, rather than cable select. I've got an older 5.25 USB enclosure that requires PATA devices configured as such.

[kahlid74]

Yeah, I would try Master mode and see what happens.

[Gray_Area]

I think I tried M, S, and CS, but I'll try again. I know there's stuff on them, because I hooked them up to a PC a while back. I don't want to have to do that all the time, of course.

[ed12]

hi
grey-area >what is sata pata combination mode <
not steping on toe's
but i wanted to look up  :pata: and i caught raid driver's
so i dug a tad futher
as i run a 1 terabyte sata
and a 160gig ide..on xp sp3 u caught my eye with your post
i never knew u could run a sata in master/slave/cs mode's?,at least mine have no jumper's
as i rem scsi day's they are assigned by either bios and or a bios controller
ie a extra card

ed

[MonMotha]

I have had several USB PATA readers, including those little "puck" designs that just plug straight into the back of the drive.  Very handy with laptop drives as they provide all the power necessary.  I've never had to mess with the jumper settings on the drive unless it was set to slave or some of the older drives that have a "master with slave forced present" setting.  Understandably, those needed to be changed to master or cable select as it makes little sense to have a "slave" without a "master" or a "master with slave present" when there is in fact no slave present.  Both cable select and master settings always seemed to work for me, but YMMV of course.  There's tons of bridge chips out there, and I'm sure they all have quirks.  Not a lot of QA gets done on these cheap consumer devices.

I have no idea what's up with the whole "power the entire system down" thing with a USB adapter.  The drive has no idea what's going on with the system.  This should all be hidden by USB through the bridge chipset.  Again, with so many different ones out there, YMMV.  This should apply equally to SATA drives on USB adapters.

Note that you may need to power cycle the USB adapter to get it to initialize and see a PATA drive since hot-detect can be difficult (lack of standardization).  The whole "insert a disk into drive X" would be indicative of this.

Now, with native "docks" that actually just pass the IDE bus straight through, yes, you'll probably need to power down when swapping.  Native IDE hot-swap support was rather rare and, to my knowledge, never fully standardized anyway.  I've done it before, just to see what would happen, but I only ever did it with Linux, and it took some hdparm "magic" to get things into a working state that probably has no analog on Windows.

SATA natively supports hot-swap, though the implementation is left as optional.  eSATA relies on it.  IIRC, all of the popular SATA 2 (3Gb/sec) and later chipsets support it.  Many SATA 1 (1.5Gb/sec) chipsets did not support hot-swap.

SATA disks should not have any concept of "master" or "slave" or "cable select" as SATA is a point-to-point technology.  What "SATA Combined Mode" does is make SATA disks appear to the OS in the same "namespace" as PATA disks.  In this case, your SATA disk may appear as the "secondary slave", for example, even if you don't have a PATA disk in that position.  The BIOS does some tricks to make it so that when the OS accesses the "Secondary Slave" disk, it actually goes out the appropriate SATA port.  This is a compatibility trick and isn't required for an OS with native SATA (AHCI) support (which is basically anything newer than WinXP).


Now, old school SCSI had the addresses assigned by jumpers.  SCSI 3 allows the controller to enumerate things.  Note that SCSI 3 is over a decade old at this point having been superseded by SAS.

[ed12]

hi
MonMotha
that just clearded it up for me
this is why i went to  mobo's with on-board-ide and -sata

thk-u

ed

[kahlid74]

I have had several USB PATA readers, including those little "puck" designs that just plug straight into the back of the drive.  Very handy with laptop drives as they provide all the power necessary.  I've never had to mess with the jumper settings on the drive unless it was set to slave or some of the older drives that have a "master with slave forced present" setting.  Understandably, those needed to be changed to master or cable select as it makes little sense to have a "slave" without a "master" or a "master with slave present" when there is in fact no slave present.  Both cable select and master settings always seemed to work for me, but YMMV of course.  There's tons of bridge chips out there, and I'm sure they all have quirks.  Not a lot of QA gets done on these cheap consumer devices.

I have no idea what's up with the whole "power the entire system down" thing with a USB adapter.  The drive has no idea what's going on with the system.  This should all be hidden by USB through the bridge chipset.  Again, with so many different ones out there, YMMV.  This should apply equally to SATA drives on USB adapters.

Note that you may need to power cycle the USB adapter to get it to initialize and see a PATA drive since hot-detect can be difficult (lack of standardization).  The whole "insert a disk into drive X" would be indicative of this.

Now, with native "docks" that actually just pass the IDE bus straight through, yes, you'll probably need to power down when swapping.  Native IDE hot-swap support was rather rare and, to my knowledge, never fully standardized anyway.  I've done it before, just to see what would happen, but I only ever did it with Linux, and it took some hdparm "magic" to get things into a working state that probably has no analog on Windows.

SATA natively supports hot-swap, though the implementation is left as optional.  eSATA relies on it.  IIRC, all of the popular SATA 2 (3Gb/sec) and later chipsets support it.  Many SATA 1 (1.5Gb/sec) chipsets did not support hot-swap.

SATA disks should not have any concept of "master" or "slave" or "cable select" as SATA is a point-to-point technology.  What "SATA Combined Mode" does is make SATA disks appear to the OS in the same "namespace" as PATA disks.  In this case, your SATA disk may appear as the "secondary slave", for example, even if you don't have a PATA disk in that position.  The BIOS does some tricks to make it so that when the OS accesses the "Secondary Slave" disk, it actually goes out the appropriate SATA port.  This is a compatibility trick and isn't required for an OS with native SATA (AHCI) support (which is basically anything newer than WinXP).


Now, old school SCSI had the addresses assigned by jumpers.  SCSI 3 allows the controller to enumerate things.  Note that SCSI 3 is over a decade old at this point having been superseded by SAS.

I've had five PATA to USB and each one operated differently, two were even identical units.  Each one at some point in time had to be powered up with the computer off.  Can't really explain it better than that.  PATA to USB is quirky stuff, especially with $19.99 readers.  I get what you're saying in theory but realistically I've had a very different experience than you.

[Gray_Area]

I've cycled the reader. No dice, and the behavior is the same for both SATA and PATA.