eSATA on internal SATA III

Image Burn was not working anymore, hung up whilst trying to load the CD-ROM drivers, then after 5 minutes it quit, and gave me a blue screen forcing the PC to reboot.

As I have 5 SATA disk drives on my internal SATA II controllers, and on the 6th SATA II controller I have the external eSATA port attached, I plugged the CD-ROM drive to one of the internal SATA III controllers. Now I realized that this was the problem, CD-ROM didn't want to be plugged to a SATA III controller. After changing that, Image Burn worked again.

So I changed again, leaving me now with 5 disk drives and 1 CD-ROM drive on the 6 SATA II controllers, and I want them to be that way, SATA II 1-5 are the HDD and SATA II 6 is the CD-ROM.

But now I have the external eSATA port attached to the internal SATA III controller, and my question is, does this work? Can the eSATA port be attached to a SATA III controller, or does it need to be on a SATA II controller?

I cannot test this, as so far I don't have an eSATA disk yet.

AFAIK SATA III should be fully backwardly compatible with SATA II, and as the eSATA port you have plugged into it is just a port extender it shouldn't be a problem.

However, i think the cables and ports needed for SATA III are a higher specification than SATA II, so anything you plug into the eSATA port might only run at SATA II speeds. But that is still be 300MB/s, so more than fast enough for most devices.

BTW, I hope you have a powerful PSU in your PC if you are running 5 HDDs. Although each HDD should only require about 30W maximum each, so total of 150W needed for all 5, HDDs put a lot of strain on the PSU at bootup time, as they need to draw a lot more Amps from the PSU to spin up and begin working.

I had a Pioneer DVR-218L plugged into the SATA III and it worked, only Image Burn had problems recognizing it, still don't know why though.

I have a 700W PSU, the COUGAR S700, really nice, reliable, performant and quiet PSU.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...cougars700.jpg

The Cougar PSUs are meant to be some of the most efficient and reliable. Sadly they are a German/Taiwan make based on HEC PSUs, and so are not normally sold in the UK.