Mike, The drive will function till the server restarts and will throw the F1 prompt  to continue each time.   The bios isn't designed to run drives separately from the controller other than a CD\DVD unit during POST.   Regards,
Hello, I'm attempting to utilize two of the onboard SATA ports in my PE1900 so I can back up data to an external drive.  I have a PERC5i card that hosts the OS and storage disks.  I enabled the ports in the BIOS and was able to write to the drive, but found that if the drive is ever off that the machine will not boot.  I did make sure the BIOS has been updated to the current release. I'm prompted to press F1 to continue booting particularly if the eSATA connected drive is off (but I believe it also happens when the drive is on - since it does not have a bootloader installed on it).  Past forum posts haven't rendered a solution so far: This person has a PE2900, but there was no answer [0]. And here somebody claims it works [1], but I've found it doesn't for me.  Does anyone have  a suggestion in order to get this to work? Or is this a setup that is not possible to have? I would have thought the onboard SATA ports would have been made a separate boot device from the PERC RAID card, but it isn't that way based on the options I have in my BIOS.  Thanks for your help, Mike  [0] [URL]#19422936 [1] [URL]#19429884
PowerEdge 1900 - eSATA ports halt the boot sequence