eSATA wakeup

I have an eSATA controller in my PC, plus external docking. I can only get the disks recognized when starting HWiNFO64, when  it starts polling the hardware. Then the disks become visible. Now, it's overkill having to start HWiNFO64 every time I need to connect a disk. so I wonder what exactly HWiNFO64 does when polling the disks, and if it's reproducible in another way. A script polling just the disks, then quitting, for instance?