Still no solution. I think this is the best solution so far. The lead i showed on the very first post is actually what you need for this setup SATA with spring lock at one side, and eSATA with precious little locking at the other end. So...at least one end will be held firm inside the pc and retained somewhat by the grommits. All you have to rely on for the eSATA side are the tiny spring blips shown in the attached picture.

Best I can offer is to (with the cable unplugged!) carefully tease these out just a little, so that you have a fraction more tension to hold the plug in situ.

Alternatively, make a little L bracket up from a piece of right angled plastic and put some heavy duty double side tape on it to then stick/hold/brace the cable in place.

Anyone else found anything else?

I have given up trying to get the ESATA connection on my Dell to work. Would never recognize anything connected to it. Bought an eSATA board and put it in the 435 and I now can run my eSATA external drive (both of them).

What kind of card did you buy Terry? Adaptec?

Sorry I've been absent for a couple of months, but I wanted to report that the eSATA connection on my replacement Dell Studio XPS is working properly. I was never certain if the problem was my eSATA connector, the eSATA cable or my eSATA 1TB external drive, but after replacing all of them it works.

Now if I could just get Vegas 8.1 to work on my 64-bit machine, that would be something. 8.0 runs fine on it.

Don't feel badly Sam. I could never get 8.1 to work properly for me either.

It was really sad to find that the 64 bit version of 9 isn't worth much on my PC either, but there are others for whom it works fine.

Wee question for any of you Dell XPS users that were reading this thread. Have you noticed that your internet connection seems to hang every time the eSATA drive spins up/down from a hibernate state?

Alastair, you might go into Windows and change the power settings to not turn off your hard drives after 20 minutes if you haven't already.

I had same issue with external esata drives and that fixed it for me.

Was STILL getting it even after that. Ended up going even further into the advanced power settings and setting the Allow Hybrid Sleep to OFF. So far....seems to have worked.

Jeff,
Better late than never :>)
Yes, it was an Adaptic card and it is still working, but not without some kinks. I have to have the eSATYA drive booted up (turned on) when I boot up my computer or the puter freezes on boot up. Its still upsetting that Dell would sell me a computer with an eSATA port that would not work and they can't even fix it.

Terry, I don't know the reason why, but with eSata drives I have found, regardless of the controller used, that the drives connected to eSata controllers must be powered on prior to windows being booted up or the drives will not be seen. So this is how it is "supposed" to be.

These drives/controllers are not hot pluggable as USB and Firewire are, at least not the ones that I've had.

I've always been able to hot-swap eSATA drives. The only issue I've ever had was on a Toshiba laptop--the drive needed to be initialized and formatted before Vista 64 would see the drive--but that caused the whole thing to lock up regardless of the drive being on. Just initialized/formatted it on a different computer...

eSATA is *supposed* to be hot-swappable, and for me, it always has been, across Abit and Asus motherboards, and an Sil3132 card.

Thanks,
Matt

Actually since you mention it I guess they are as long as their is a drive powered up and connected at boot up, then you can switch them. If no drive is powered up and connected atwindows boot up then the controller bios aren't loaded and you can't then expect to see a drive that is hooked up after boot up is done.

Mine behaves itself in that respect. I can power it up after boot up and swap drives at will. My problem was the every time the drive went into/came out of hibernate (you heard it spin down/up) the PC would go sluggish and the internet connection would just hang/freeze.

An update on my ESata situation. After reading Jeffs post I decided to retry my built in eSata but by powering up the drive before booting up the computer. Low and Behold IT WORKED. I now have my ESata connected to the bulit in port rather than the added card AND IT IS WORKING. I could have sworn we tried that before we replaced mother board but maybe not. Any way, it seems to be working. Now I have 2 extra ESata ports.

Yes Terry, if the bios for the card aren't loaded with the drive already powered up then the drive won't be seen. Glad it's working for you now.