Dell :: ESata Plug Differences: E6500 Vs. E6400 Vs. E4300

I wanted to share with the forum some strange, yet interesting findings that I've come up with in the last week or so.

First, some background. I am the IT manager/senior admin for my company. I do all of the purchasing and high end tech stuff, so I get to play with a fair amount of hardware and equipment before deploying it to the company.

For the last year or so, I've owned an E4300 as my work laptop, and have been purchasing E6400's to deploy to our company. Some of our consultants have dual internal hard drives using the Newmodeus optical bay caddy, and use an esata/usb combo port to power their optical devices when they need. We also utilize the Coolmax esata/usb enclosures for external drives. All of these devices work great on our older E6400's and my E4300.

Recently, I made another order of some E6400's and 2 E6500's as a trial. No matter what I do, the Newmodeus cables (I have a hard drive one as well) will NOT work with the E6500 and 1 of our new E6400s. Occasionally, by wiggling the cable in the plug and pushing hard, I can get a device to be detected for a few seconds. I decided to have Dell come out and replace the motherboard in 1 to see if I got a defective board.

Well, that didn't help at all, so I dug a little deeper. I borrowed a colleagues Coolmax enclosure, and plugged that in. To my amazement, it worked fine. I compared the esata cables....and the Coolmax cable is ~1-2mm longer than the Newmodeus cables.

The port depth on some of these machines must be a little deeper than others, not allowing the cable to fully seat and get a good connection. I have 2 E6500's and 1 E6400 with this issue.

My next plan of attack is to use a small saw to cut a little of the plastic off the Newmodeus cables to see if I can get them to seat a little deeper. I will report back my findings. I never thought something so simple would be such a PITA.