Perhaps a silly question but why is is that when I hot-plug my external hard-drive using USB it autmounts without needed anything and when I hot-plug the same drive in the same case using eSATA, I need the root password?
I’d like neither to need the root password… I guess it is not the same piece of code that automounts both… maybe the authors didn’t talk to each other… 
Thanks in advance,
Perhaps a silly question but why is is that when I hot-plug my external hard-drive using USB it autmounts without needed anything and when I hot-plug the same drive in the same case using eSATA, I need the root password?
Yes, good question. SATA and USB drives are treated differently. Hopefully, I’ve got this right, and understood your question. The former are generally assumed to be internal, and always available, and usually have static entries in /etc/fstab. USB drives are assumed to be external, hot-pluggable, and handled by hal,udev, desktop environment. It is possible to customise this behaviour. You should be able to configure the SATA partition(s) concerned with YaST > System > Partitioner. Click on the partition concerned and ‘Edit’. Under the fstab options, you can choose whether or not the partition can be mounted by user.
BTW, good background here:
SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE
Adding to deano_ferrari’s excelent advice (in particular about the link he provides), I may add that the word ‘automount’ is a bit dangerous to use for: mounting the partition(s) for usage by the end-user at connection time.
This is not to be pedantic about your usage of the word (well, maybe a bit 
), but to avoid that you get confused when reading about these different phenomenons.
. Originaly Sun Microsystems added an extension to NFS to let NFS clients mount remote filesystems only when they are realy needed by a process. This is done by the automounter which has the name *automount *in Linux and uses configuration files like auto.master. I think that it requires no further explanation that people using this, talk about ‘automounting’.
. The entries in /etc/fstab are mainly there for mounting partitions at boot time. There is a parameter noauto, that lets this not happen at a call of mount -a (which is done at boot). This led to people thinking that the mounting at boot (and mount -a) is automounting (IMHO the* -a* stands for ‘all’ not for ‘auto’).
. And since some time we have devices that are hotplugged by the end-user himself (in fact doing this task a the oparator of the system, but hat is a not as one thinks of it on a desktop/laptop). And the end-user wants then to use the device without having to ask the system manager (he again, executing this task himself by becoming root) to do a mount for him. As you can read in the link provided by deano_ferrari HAL is doing this automagicaly and thus those end-users think it fit to call this automouting, not aware of the fact that this term is already in use.
About your problem. I wonder if doing something with the configuration of HAL might be a cure.