Asus Z87-Pro - Can't hot swap on Asmedia Sata Ports

Over the past few days I've gotten my new rig built.

Specs:

Cooler Master HAF-XB case
Asus Z87-Pro motherboard
i7-4770k
16gb RAM
EVGA GTX 660 SC
Slim BD-Rom Drive
240gb Sandisk Extreme SSD (OS Drive)
2 x 1TB WD Velociraptor in RAID0 on motherboard Intel RAID controller
Windows 8.1 Pro

So it's running quite well. The only thing that's annoying me is that I have the 2 hot swap bays from the case connected to the 2 brown SATA ports on the motherboard going to the Asmedia ASM1061 SATA controller. In the BIOS I've enabled hot swap for the Asmedia controller. However when I plug a drive into the hot swap bay while the computer is on nothing happens. The drive does not show up in computer nor in Disk Management. After the next restart, the drive shows up.

Not a deal breaker, but what's going on here? I've enabled disk automounting in 8.1 because that seems to be a bug (just did a clean install of 8.1 for a client and USB hard drives weren't showing up automatically, had to enable automount in cmd --> diskpart). BIOS is updated to the latest.

Anyone here with the same problem? What's going on?

I am not really sure on this but the same thing happened to me. I did nothing to change it and all seems to be working fine now. I think the controller is just a bit goofy at times. Sry for the non-scientific explanation. I am running Win 7 64

Thanks for the response. I'll just leave it alone until the next time I need it. Not something I would RMA a board over considering that it's more of a quirk with the chip than a defect.

In the bios if you look at your sata ports you have to change a value so the mobo knows your hot swapping on that sata port then you should be good... but after reading you said you had already done that? Have you updated the bios to the newest version and have you made sure you have the latest divers from ASUS?

Thanks for the response. What you're saying is true if I was hooking this up directly to the Intel chipset SATA ports. In the BIOS I can toggle hot swap for each port individually. However, for the Asmedia controller, it's literally a PCIe expansion device, just soldered onto the motherboard instead of being a physical card, but the wiring is extremely similar. There is a 'master' hot swap enable/ disable toggle for all the SATA ports on the controller, and that is already enabled...

There is no driver for the Asmedia SATA controller.

As far as BIOS versions, I used EZ-Update in the Asus AI Suite software to update to the 'latest' which was 1504. Looking on the Asus support site, the latest there seems to be 1707. But AI Suite tells me I'm on the latest. Interesting... I'll give that a shot...

Update: just updated BIOS to 1707 (absolute latest), re-enabled all of the previously discussed configurations in the BIOS, restarted, plugged in a hard drive in the hotswap bay, and nothing. A restart after plugging in the drive makes it show up, as before.

raykholo said:

Thanks for the response. What you're saying is true if I was hooking this up directly to the Intel chipset SATA ports. In the BIOS I can toggle hot swap for each port individually. However, for the Asmedia controller, it's literally a PCIe expansion device, just soldered onto the motherboard instead of being a physical card, but the wiring is extremely similar. There is a 'master' hot swap enable/ disable toggle for all the SATA ports on the controller, and that is already enabled...

There is no driver for the Asmedia SATA controller.

As far as BIOS versions, I used EZ-Update in the Asus AI Suite software to update to the 'latest' which was 1504. Looking on the Asus support site, the latest there seems to be 1707. But AI Suite tells me I'm on the latest. Interesting... I'll give that a shot...

Update: just updated BIOS to 1707 (absolute latest), re-enabled all of the previously discussed configurations in the BIOS, restarted, plugged in a hard drive in the hotswap bay, and nothing. A restart after plugging in the drive makes it show up, as before.

Click to expand...

There absolutely is an Asmedia driver for that controller. I have the Z87-WS, which has the same Asmedia SATA controller and I seem to remember hot-swap not working until I loaded the driver. Oddly, the driver isn't available on your motherboards driver page on the ASUS website. It is available on the Z87-WS page though. I would load that driver and see if that allows hot-swap to work. Here is the driver location:

http://http://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Z87WS/#support

Here is what you should see in Device Manager after you load the driver:



Good luck!

I would use intel controller for hot-swap. All additional controllers have more or less issues. Also ASUS usually doesn't care to update drivers to best available versions on their website and drops support pretty fast so best is to look for drivers on chip manufacturer's site.

Interestingly enough, it seems that I did have the Asmedia driver installed. I repair installed the one linked from the Z87-WS page (same version), no change. The chip does not show up in Device Manager. Under Storage Controllers, I have the Intel Controller and Microsoft Storage Spaces Controller. Other people are saying that for the Asmedia 1061 there is no driver with Win 8.1 compatibility because 8.1 has the necessary drives built in...
So I uninstalled the Asmedia driver and see absolutely no difference in the way anything looks in Device Manager.

I do currently have 2 ports available on the Intel controller, but I want to keep those open for another RAID of 2 hard drives that I plan to add later, so even if I did make the switch to all Intel, it would only be a temporary solution... I'd rather deal with this and get it figured out... Thanks.

BMWdude, based on the color scheme of that Device Manger window, you're running Windows Server 2012?

I have that on my file server. It's the equivalent of Windows 8 when things still worked. Server OS should always work though. I feel like 8.1 made things so much more unstable.

raykholo said:

BMWdude, based on the color scheme of that Device Manger window, you're running Windows Server 2012?

I have that on my file server. It's the equivalent of Windows 8 when things still worked. Server OS should always work though. I feel like 8.1 made things so much more unstable.

Click to expand...

No, actually that is 8.1. I just use a different color scheme.

BMWDude49120 said:

No, actually that is 8.1. I just use a different color scheme.

Click to expand...

Ok. Between the color scheme and the fact that you were running a workstation board, seems like a sure guess. Nice work tricking me

Anyways, I can't get the Asm1061 to show up in device manager. All I have is the Intel controller and Microsoft Storage Spaces..

Thoughts?
EDIT: So, I just installed the driver again to no avail, decided to perform a hail-mary (which is usually my last step to fixing the problem) and disabled the Asm1061 hot-plug feature in BIOS. And now it works! In one of the other forums someone wrote, there are no drivers for this chipset because Windows 8 can handle it natively, and Asmedia says to let it. I guess there was some truth in that. Once I get an image of my system in this configuration, I might uninstall that driver and see if I can still hot swap.

THANKS EVERYONE!

Strike the success story. With or without the driver installed, and with hot-plugging the Asm1061 disabled in the BIOS, I can only get one hot-plugged drive to show up. So when I decided to test both of my hot-swap bays (each hooked up to 1 of the 2 Asmedia SATA ports) only the first inserted drive shows up. (Until reboot I presume, will test as soon as I post this).

I'm willing to leave it at this considering that I plan to put a 3.5" drive in the bottom bay as a semi-permanent installation, and only make use of the top bay for hot-plugging drives, but if anyone else is interested in keeping this thread going with solutions and whatnot, I'm up for it.

Thanks

One thing to note is that, on my system at least, the Asmedia controller shows up under the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" section in Device Manager, not under the "Storage Controllers" section.

I appreciate it. I've checked there before as well. Under IDE I have had a single device listed - Standard SATA AHCI Controller and it has not changed to Asmedia... after installing the drivers.

I heeded the advice of Woomack and moved the hot swap bays over to the Intel Controller for now.