Snow Leopard Incompatibility With Many eSATA Cards

[David Roth weiss]

[gary adcock] “Works in Safari on Snow- I checked it to make sure “

When i click on the link below from your post it takes me to a place that says the post is deactivated.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/Inside%20look%20at%20the%20IoHD

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Cory Caplan]

Just got this response (within 30 minutes on a Sunday AM at that…) from Firmtek support..
..I assume this is with respect to the fact that most of us will be running Snow Leopard in 32-bit mode anyway

https://hothardware.com/News/Apples-64Bit-Snow-Leopard-OS-Installs-32Bit-Kernel-By-Default/

__________________________

If you are using the 32-bit default mode of Snow Leopard, the existing 5.3.2 driver will work
with the SeriTek/2SE2-E. However, a restart may be required when changing hard disk
configurations.

FirmTek is currently testing a new Snow Leopard compatible driver and plans to post it in the
download section of FirmTek.com once it is validated. The final driver will probably be
available within two weeks.

Thank you,

Michael
FirmTek, LLC

[Bob Zelin]

this thread is giving me an ulcer. Although it’s been 2 years since
I’ve used Sil 31xx boards, I have COUNTLESS clients that have port multiplier products that use host cards or chassis that have this chip set as part of their drive configurations. Sonnet used the Marvell chipset, but the chassis had the Sil (Silicon Image) chips to feed the 5 drives. You would see these products from Sonnet, Dulce, Cal Digit (Fasta 4e, 4x), and anyone else that used port multiplication with eSATA. I am glad that people that I trust have posted that it’s still “working” – but Zane still makes me nervous about this.

Thanks for this information.

Bob Zelin

[Cory Caplan]

As I have a fully CCC backed-up Leopard install, I went ahead and upgraded to SL. The driver seems to work, albeit in 32-bit mode.

Off Topic for SL: although I’m sure there’s a lot of streamlined/removed legacy code, I think a lot of these people reporting ’20 GB freed up’ may not realize that Snow Leopard calculates space differently–

Before the update, I had about 89GB free on my ‘289 GB’ drive, (30.7%) and after the update (with Rosetta) I had ‘103GB’ available on my ‘319 GB’ drive (32.2%) So though it seems like I “got 14GB”, (89-103 GB Free) I only got 1.5% or 4.3 ‘Old GB’ or 4.8 ‘New GB. Sneaky, sneaky Apple. Aah, you can’t hide from inflation.

[Jim Wiseman]

Any chance that Silicon Image or anyone else will rewrite the SiI3132 driver, or is that wishful thinking? Apparently the 3134 driver still works. I wonder if it is such a fundamental change in Snow that Apple might not be of some help with this problem.

Jim Wiseman

[David Cabestany]

I installed my brand new copy of Snow Leopard this morning and everything was fine until I tried to plug my external 320 gb Western Digital drive via my Dynex ExpressCard. Nothing. As it turns out the driver required for this card is now in the incompatible software folder recently created by Snow Leopard.

BUT, out of desperation after looking in several sites including, Dynex’s, Silicon Image’s and another one I can’t remember, I ended up re-downloading the driver (Sil3132) and installing it again, miraculously the hard drive is up again and apparently running as usual, I loaded a Premiere Project just to test and so far so good. In fact it runs quite a lot faster than it used to before.

I haven’t woken up from my dream so far, but I’ll keep you posted as any news develop.

Best,

D.

[Zane Barker]

[david Cabestany] “I ended up re-downloading the driver (Sil3132) and installing it again”

I tried that here and still got kernel panics any time the card was connected. I did an erase and install on my system to make sure the new OS was as clean as can be and sure the drive would show up after installing the driver but it will cause kernal panics.

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

[David Cabestany]

Zane,

Try using the installer from this website,

https://www.dynexproducts.com/pc-687-7-dynex-2-port-esata-ii-expresscard-adapter.aspx

That’s the one I’m using and it’s working fine, mine is a Dynex 2-Port eSATA II ExpressCard Adapter, bought it in Best Buy for $74. Not that I really know about cards or anything, it was the only one on stock when I bought it and so far so good.

I’m afraid to turn off my computer tonight tough…

D.

[Chip Murphy]

I have an eSata card in my Mac Pro and the original driver is incompatible, and the dynex download fixed it. Thank you!

[Zak Wolfinger]

FYI – I also reinstalled the Sil 3132 driver from Dynex (I happen to have the Dynex e-Sata II PCExpress card) and…

Install completed cleanly
Inserted the card and it was recognized (the icon showed up on the menu bar)
Turned on my 500G Seagate FreeAgent drive

Immediate Kernel Panic!

However…. I then rebooted the MacBook Pro (17″ circa 2008 w/32bit EFI)
Snow Leopard now sees the drive and everything is working. This is my Time Machine drive and TM is currently backing up – no errors / panics so far.

So I guess “they” are right – if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! Best of luck.