Hot Swappable SATA Card For Win8.1?

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Mr Milquetoast

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I have a front facing 3.5inch drive bay, which is connected to a PCIe SATA card based on a ASMedia ASM1061 chip. Under Windows 7, when I insert a drive into the bay it is automatically detected and shows up in My Computer. The Safely Remove Hardware icon also appears in the system tray so the drive can be safely stopped when I'm ready to remove it.

Unfortunately ASMedia don't provide an ASM1061 driver for Windows 8.1 so I have to use the default Microsoft StorACHI driver. With this driver if I insert a drive it doesn't automatically detect, and I have to restart the computer to make the drive show up. Also, the Safely Remove Hardware icon doesn't appear in the system tray so I can't safely stop the drive before removing it.

I therefore need a solution so I can hot swap drives in Windows 8.1. Is there any way to enable hot swapping wit the StorACHI driver? If not, does anyone know of a SATA card that supports hot swapping and has a Windows 8.1 driver?
 
Pretty much any real RAID card should support it.

But.. there might be a registry setting you can change to set the controller to have the drives to be detected as removable.

It was actually a bug in Windows 7 that allowed that to happen on that card and pretty much any SATA device.

I would think that you should be able to force it to work that way in 8.1 although I haven't tried it.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/my-internal-sata-device-appears-in-devices-and/722221d6-d59c-4cf7-803c-8203e6344b93
 
Mr Milquetoast said:
Unfortunately ASMedia don't provide an ASM1061 driver for Windows 8.1 so I have to use the default Microsoft StorACHI driver. With this driver if I insert a drive it doesn't automatically detect, and I have to restart the computer to make the drive show up.
Click to expand...
What happens if you disable/enable the controller in Device Manager?
 
cyclone3d said:
Pretty much any real RAID card should support it.

But.. there might be a registry setting you can change to set the controller to have the drives to be detected as removable.

It was actually a bug in Windows 7 that allowed that to happen on that card and pretty much any SATA device.

I would think that you should be able to force it to work that way in 8.1 although I haven't tried it.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/my-internal-sata-device-appears-in-devices-and/722221d6-d59c-4cf7-803c-8203e6344b93
Click to expand...
If found that setting while searching around for a solution, but unfortunately it isn't in Windows 8. Windows 7 used the MSAHCI driver which Microsoft replaced with the StorAHCI driver in Windows 8, and it doesn't seem to have a corresponding setting.

StorAHCI does have an ignorHotPlug, but it's a string value and I couldn't find any information on what this string represents. By default it's: VEN_1002&DEV_4380&REV_*

I might have to look into a new card.

HammerSandwich said:
What happens if you disable/enable the controller in Device Manager?
Click to expand...
I'll give that a try. The card is currently in my Windows 7 machine, but I'll put it back in the Windows 8 machine later and see if that works.
 
What do you have for onboard SATA (or are you out of ports)? Most newer motherboards with Intel SATA will let you set the removable flag for individual ports in the BIOS, and then they'll show up as removable in Windows.

Note that you might see some weirdness with this if you're using the Intel AHCI drivers, but the default Windows AHCI drivers in 8.1 should support it like you'd expect.
 
diizzy said:
Their drivers works fine i Windows 8/8.1, just install using device manager.
Source: http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/54863-asmedia-sata-drivers-win-8-1-a.html
//Danne
Click to expand...
Oh, I'd just been running the installer and it wasn't working at all (Windows wouldn't even start up). I'll give it a try by installing the driver from the device manager.

JBark said:
What do you have for onboard SATA (or are you out of ports)? Most newer motherboards with Intel SATA will let you set the removable flag for individual ports in the BIOS, and then they'll show up as removable in Windows.

Note that you might see some weirdness with this if you're using the Intel AHCI drivers, but the default Windows AHCI drivers in 8.1 should support it like you'd expect.
Click to expand...
A newer board I bought has that option, but unfortunately this one is quite old (Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H) and there's no option on the BIOS to flag a port as removable :(
 
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