[Solved] EVGA P55 SLI eSata Troubles

I've been using the EVGA P55 SLI motherboard for going on 2 years now. I just picked up a used 5 bay Sans Digital enclosure that has an eSata interface.

Before I bought it, i did a quick check online to see if P55 boards had port multiplying capability. Whatever I saw made me think they did, so I went ahead and bought it.

I get home tonight.. move drives into the enclosure.. power it up.. Only a single drive shows up on my system. This screamed "you're an idiot, I don't port multiply" to me. I messed with AHCI settings, flashed my BIOS, and updated chipset drivers. Nothing fixed it.

In between looking at add-on cards, I was continuing my endless attempt at Googling my way out of the problem. Then I came across this post on xtremesystems.org that saved my life.

User getoffmylawn said the following:

I had the exact same problem. Using lspci under Linux, I was able to determine that the eSata ports were connected to a Marvell 6121 controller.

The Asus P5Q-Deluxe Wi-Fi motherboard has the same controller. If you go the the Asus support site, select motherboards->socket 775->P5Q-Deluxe-WiFi(blah blah blah), then expand SATA, and you should see a Marvell 6121 driver. 

If you expand the zip file, follow the directories in, and I think I installed by running drvSetup.exe, not AsusSetup.exe. Once the drivers are installed correctly, you should see a "Generic Marvell 61xx RAID controller" in the device manager under storage controllers. 

At this point, hotplugging should we working!!

the instructions were perfect and enabled hot swap and port multiplication using my back panel eSATA port.