Windows 7 and external Sata drives

So tonight i finished the install of essential apps on Windows 7 and disconnected the old xp machine. Since all the work files are on the external western digital 1 terabyte external i thought it would be simple to unplug from xp and plug into windows7. All the other computers (mac/linux) have external e-sata drives (so much faster than slow USB), so what could go wrong.

Fire up windows 7 and it doesn't mount the external drive. Go into Administrative Tools, Drive Management and it still can't even find the drive. Weird. After wasting a lot of time poking around windows and looking on the internet it looks like lots of people have similar problems. This boggles the mind. Just to make sure i haul out a second e-sata hard drive, a LaCie this time. Same problem - not mounted. I booted windows with both drives just to be sure.

I goto western digital's site and they have a firmware update and some wd drive management software. Yikes, if i install the firmware what if it bricks the drive? Especially since the backup drives got cleaned and moved to the living room to connect to the Oppo BDP-93 (which btw had no problem mounting the drive, Steve Ballmer). Best to back up the course files.

So i plug the drive into the USB port (all my externals are 4 interface drives, usb/e-sata/fw400/fw800) and windows recognizes it and starts seaching it for music and other files. I put a stop to that right away. Now we start up the copy operation and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait...i said USB was slow, right?

Might as well go and see if the HDCD burning problem with Brasero is fixed....i suspect optical drive has gone bad...i see i/o errors in the log...

To Be Continued

Ok firmware update worked ok but drive still not recognized when plugged into e-sata
Next we install the WD drive manager setup software - installs but no menu item??? and it is not a control panel...

We decide on a low tech solution, grab and old firewire pci card from the box 'o parts and put that it.....OK windows recognizes the card. Let's shut down the external and plug in into there..ok it immediately installs the 'device driver software' and the stupid auto search for content comes up. Gee, in the days of mega terabyte externals maybe the default should be NO auto....

And the drive is there. So let's see - a modern e-sata interface that should be plug and play does not work in Windows 7 but an ancient technology going back to early macs works automatically. Lesson - don't discard your old firewire stuff yet...

PS

Multi-tasking in windows still sucks badly. Doing any kind of large scale file operations ties up the computer completely until the task is done. I am so not used to this. Linux and OSX are so much better at multi-tasking. People focus on whether the OS is 'faster' and forget about all the time you spend waiting for windows. The more time i spend in Windows 7 the less i like it. Sure it is prettier than XP and is not as absolutely annoying as Vista but in reality it is no big improvement.