eSata card and 10.5.5

[David Roth weiss]

Get your express card from Firmtek. There are many expres cards on the market, but only a few that work reliably on a Macbook/Macbook Pro. https://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/seritek2sm2e.html

David Roth Weiss
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[Zane Barker]

[Ryan Atkins] “Sil132”

Yea that driver is JANKY.

And I just looked into the package contents of the firmtek card and it contains the same problematic Sil132 driver.

I know people that have had no problems using it, I on the other hand have had nothing but problems with it. It seems to pick and choose which model MBP it will play nice with.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Ryan Atkins]

Is there such a card manufactured that runs perfect on any version of Leopard? I read that the RC-605 runs great on 10.5.1 and has a driver included on a CD as well as Rosewills website.

I was getting very inconsistent data transfers and ended up resulting back to my firewire connection, which transferred my 40 GB of data in about 20 minutes. I can live with that, not an hour…

Any suggestions for eSata, other than the Firmtek?

Unlike Windows operating systems, Mac OS X seems to update their software much more frequently, so I can see why the driver wouldn’t work…but I’m not going to downgrade to 10.5.1 just to use the eSata cards.

[Ryan Atkins]

David,

Going off of what Zane mentioned about the Sil132 driver, is the Firmtek compatible with the latest version of Leopard 10.5.5? Really, this card would be no better than the Rosewill RC-605 if it has not worked with these latest updates. I don’t know if any other users have updated their Macs running Leopard to 10.5.5.

Knowing the 10.5.5 update is relatively new, you’d think that there are cards whos drivers are compatible with this…

[Sean Oneil]

Ryan. Firmtek has a driver update for their product on the website. You might want to try it with your product since it has the same SATA controller.

Sean

[Ryan Atkins]

Thank you for the info. I will try this and hope that I get better results…

Ryan

[Ryan Atkins]

Forgot to ask this in my last post.

There are many drivers, for I assume their product line. Could I just pick one or is there a specific card whos driver is the same as mine?

[Ryan Atkins]

Thanks Sean, I had much better results. I tried out an 11 GB transfer, which was only going to take about 10 minutes. However, the transfer stopped a few times. I’ve already contacted Rosewill support about the inconsistency in general, but I may decide that I can deal with the transfers stopping randomly, not sure.

It’s sure not functioning like a transfer between internal SATA hard drives.

[Sean Oneil]

Which product is the same as yours? Use that one.

The driver update could be a replacement for the Apple driver, which could make it work or make it not work at all. You’d have to remove it and re-install the original Apple driver (which is complicated).

There’s also a firmware update. Chances are it won’t work with your product. But it could – which could in turn fix your problem, or ruin the card completely. Just giving you fair warning here.

Sean

[Tom Matthies]

I needed to do a firmware update on my Firmtek ESATA enclosure to get it to work on my Mac Pro running Leopard. After the update, it’s been solid as a rock. Check with support at Firmtek for info.
Tom