ASRock Z77 and Z97 lost SATA hotplug ability - anyone else?

[ThomasH]

Well, both my pc3k's are on ASRock motherboards, and both, within the span of 2 days suddenly lost the ability to hotplug SATA drives (with no changes to BIOS). They've always been set AHCI, and have always worked. If a SATA drive is hotplugged, it just wont detect (automatically, or after scanning in device manager). Additionally, now only USB drives (not SATA) show up under the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" button.

This was the case before uninstalling the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver, if I recall, but after doing that, they ran fine for around 5 months... until now. It really sucks not being able to hotplug destination drives for DE on the motherboard.
I guess a windows update changed something, though system restore didn't resolve, and I didn't notice an update within the time of failure in the logs.

After spending 3-5 hours tinkering with the first that went down, I just wound up reinstalling windows which fixed the problem. Then the other went down.

Anyone else having this issue just recently? especially if you have those motherboards or those with the "ASMedia 106x SATA controller"? Maybe I'm missing something obvious...


I ultimately gave up and just installed a secondary SATA3 PCIE card which works ok. When shopping for those, lots of them used an ASMedia 1061 chipset. I wonder if those are affected too... I went with a RocketRaid 620 which have been decent in the past.
Noone else having this trouble with their ASMedia Sata controllers?