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I have a D975xbx2 motherboard my plan is to hook an external drive enclosure that has an eSata bracket with it to my motherboard. I'm not wanting to leave the drive on constantly, I want to turn it off and on as needed. Does this motherboard support such a thing? Thanks Rodger

The red SATA port on the lower part of the board is for external drives.

Page 12 and 13 of the manual will show you the port.
http://download.intel.com/support/mothe ... 605_en.pdf

And according to the Intel FAQ hot swap should be available with the ACHI drivers (which you more than likely are using now)
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboar ... .htm#modes

you can read more on the Matrix raid here
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/i ... 015988.htm

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Also note that the RAID drivers support AHCI functionality including hot swap. I believe that all of the SATA ports will utilize hot swap with the drivers installed and not just the red one but I may be wrong.

I have 2 eSATA drives (using Thermaltake Max 4 enclousures) attached to my XBX2 via 2 eSATA brackets. One bracket is connected to the red Marvell eSATA port... I do have the latest version of the Marvell drivers installed. The other eSATA bracket/drive is attached to the Intel SATA port on the motherboard. I have AHCI enabled and am running the latest Intel Matrix drivers (just downloaded and installed the latest one a week ago off Intel's XBX2 drivers page). Both my eSATA drives are hot swap capable... turn them on and the OS will recognize them after a few seconds delay; I also turn them off independently without incident. One thing i notice is that if I put the PC on hybrid sleep, the Marvell powered eSATA port also puts the external drive to sleep (shuts it down even though the fan of the Max 4 is still powered on).

I did try the other Marvell SATA ports (non red) to see if they work with an eSATA setting but found out that these are not hot swappable. In other words you have to reboot the machine to get the external eSATA drive to be recognized. Only the red eSATA is hot swap capable among the Marvell ports.