A Lesson Learned: Install Your Controller Drivers

[AshleyAshes]

Queue everyone saying, 'Well, DUH.'.  I deserve that.

 

So I have an Asus X79 board that uses an Asmedia controller for it's two rear eSATA ports.  I also have a dual slot eSATA/USB3 hard drive dock from Orico but over eSATA I could never get it to work right.  Despite BIOS settings it refused to hot swap and only slot 1 worked.  The dock uses a port multiplier inside to allow two drives to operate on a single eSATA port but once I plugged in a second drive it'd never detect.  The solution was apparently, quite simply, to not just use the generic drivers that Windows used.  The controller WORKED but apparently minor features including hot swapping and port multiplication support would not work.  I was trying to use the dock for some serious cloning and finally just googled it, everything suggested to install the official Asmedia drivers instead of what Windows automatically installed.

 

And boom, one reboot later and both slots on the dock worked and either could readily hot swap.  The cheap Orico dock that had frustrated me for two years (It worked fine on USB3 but you can't do as much diagnostics or such over USB) actually worked great, I was just too lazy to install the drivers for the secondary controller on the motherboard.

[samcool55]

Had sort of a similar story actually.

My motherboard has USB 2.0 ports and USB 3.0 ports. All of them worked but for some reason the USB 3.0 ports were quite slow.

Tried to diagnose it, all looked fine but in device manager the device tree looked a bit weird.

So i downloaded the latest chipset drivers from Intel, didn't solve it.

Downloaded the one from MSI, setup complained newer drivers were already installed but installed it anyway, suddenly it was all fixed!

 

So, tip is nice but also check after installation you actually get the performance you would expect.