Snow Leopard Incompatibility With Many eSATA Cards

[Jason Brown]

Haven’t tried it…I only have 1 Big Quadra drive…that’s the only eSATA device I have.

I was looking at the 4 port card and it is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive than the 2 port. Why is this? Do people raid multiple eSATA drives together with a card like that? Is it necessary?

-Jason

[Bill Vincent]

In talking to LaCie today, the support guy said the four-port card has better overall speed than the two-port. He said typically 100MB per second is good for RAID 5 on the two port card, but could be more like 130 – 150 MB per second with the four-port, just in the way they handle the data differently.

With my 3132 card (two port) I have the LaCie drive on one port and a WD My Book drive on the other. Copying between them I get 80MB per second, no more – I believe that’s the functional speed limit on the WD drive, not the card or the LaCie drive. I haven’t experienced unreliability problems yet copying between drives, but I haven’t done too much testing.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bill Vincent] “In talking to LaCie today, the support guy said the four-port card has better overall speed than the two-port. He said typically 100MB per second is good for RAID 5 on the two port card, but could be more like 130 – 150 MB per second with the four-port, just in the way they handle the data differently.”

We’ve tried every driver LaCie has on their website and our four port eSATA card is just not working. We’re switching it out for a Sonnet card.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
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[Jason Brown]

[Bill Vincent] “the four-port card has better overall speed than the two-port”

Are you talking about running a RAID configuration with multiple eSATA plugs? Or just ONE drive plugged into ONE eSATA port?

-Jason

[Jim Wiseman]

Walter or others.

Are you using the LaCie 2Big or 4 Big Quadra drives? If you get anything to work I would like to hear about it. Tried the 3132r5 driver from Silicon Images site and it was better than the others I have tried, but froze up after 18GB of an 80GB transfer to a single FW800 drive yesterday. It seems to be the copies where it really has problems.

I’m looking at Firmtek SeriTek/2ME4-E https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2me4-e/, and the SeriTek/2SE2-E https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2se2-e/ They both will work on the PCIe G5 Quadcore I have now and look as if they would stand a good chance of working with the new Mac Pro I intend to upgrade to with the rumored i7/980x CPU due out this quarter. Might wait for those to come out but I am getting impatient running these 2Bigs on FW800.

BTW, I was getting about 120mB/sec RAID 0 out of the 2Big 2Gb and the LaCie PCIe card before the driver dumped out.

Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 1.1.2, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi Avid MC, Macbook Pro Core2Duo, G5 Quadcore PCIe, Media 100i/XR

[John Moore]

Hi there,
I have been reading Rafal Lamberts mail which recommends leaf-computers eSata Express Cards as a solution to the desperate problem of no eSata connection to my external hard drives due to upgrading to Snow Leopard.
Presently I do not have any connection via eSata. Having been recommended and buying a Sonnet card as a solution to the old card I have found that I cannot see my drives at all. I use Final Cut Pro etc… so this is an obvious problem. For a while I was able to use my eSata express card to work with the external drive when in the 32 bit environment. A couple of days ago I contacted Sonnet by mail and was recommended trying a SiliconImage3132 driver so that I could use my card to see my external disks when working in 64bit environment. This is necessary for the program I am using. However on installing that driver the response of the MacBook Pro was that now I cannot see my external disks at all. Not in 32bit or 64bit environs. Not good. Also no response from Sonnet client service about this development.
At home I am using a UltraMax Plus which I use as a fast raid on Desktop. But often I am not there and use an fast portable disk via eSata card.

I have tried contacting Leaf Computer by phone but as yet have got no reply. What do people feel about their products? Is it still functioning Rafal? Would it work in my situation?

Also a second question. Can anyone tell me the procedure for uninstalling that driver which doesn’t function?

Thanks for your time

John

[Simon Hustings]

I have the Apiotek branded Dual Port Sil 3132 Esata Express card for my 17inch MBP (Late 2008 model) running Snow Leopard. I installed the BASE drive from the Apiotek website and as long as I insert the card before powering on my MBP everything works fine.

Forget about hot swapping it though! I read in an article online (https://quernstone.com/archives/2009/04/esata-on-macs.html) that the Sil 3132 chipsets really start to freak out with MBPs running > 10.5 that have more than 2GB of RAM installed and hot swapping causes instant Kernel Panics.

I picked up the card a while ago from Jigsaw in the UK for about 30 GBP. It works fine as long as I insert it before I power up. Slightly inconvenient but I can live with that!

All the best,

Simon

“Is it me or do I spend half my life watching little grey bars turn into little blue bars??”

[John Moore]

Hi I got a resolution to my problem. Sonnet I can tell all do have customer service and I am very grateful for that. I was able to get the Tempo Sata Pro Expresscard 34 from them after being mis sold the non Pro card. Thus I have a 64 bit environment workable Expresscard. Delighted with the outcome. Hats off to Sonnet’s Customer Service guy Neal who did a fantastic international job of co ordinating that. I am delighted with this company and the product.
John

[Josh Colvert]

Lacie eSata 2 port PCI Express Card with Snow Leopard and the 4Big Quadra – WORKING

Kernel Panics, PCI card doesn’t show up in the System Profiler, Crazy conflicts with digi design drivers, you name it, it happened. For months, no one had the answer, Lacie, digidesign, apple, friends and family.. no clue.

But today, a light at the end of this particularly irritating tunnel. No promises that this any of this will be the same for you, but here’s how the problem was corrected for me.

Step 1: Install the right drivers SiI 3132 1.2.3.0
https://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=32&cat=3&os=3
I Know that these drivers say (non-RAID) but its ok if you are using a RAID system with RAID hardware like the 4Big.

Step Two: Search for the PCI card in the System Profiler, NOT THERE?

This next part sounds crazy, but this is how I got this configuration to work on two separate machines. Ready?

Step Three: Pull the PCI card out of it’s current slot and replace it in a different slot.

I don’t know why this worked but it did. By the way, the two machines were both MAC Pros, one a Dual Core and one an Eight Core. When using other drivers suggested by Lacie, Neither machine worked properly. The Dual Core Recognized the Card and Mounted the RAID, no problem, but I was then unable to run any digidesign hardware or software. Boooo. Then on the eight core, complete system failure; a persistent kernel panic that I had to fix by booting in safe mode and removing the Sil3132 drivers from the extensions folder (system/Library/Extensions).

As of right now both machines are running fine. I can now run Pro Tools 8 on OSX 10.6.3 and use the 4Big Quadra with my Lacie 2 Port PCI Express Card. Sounds simple but I assure you it was not.

[Adam Neale]

I’m using this card on a MacBook Pro (early 2008 version). I just upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and found that my Lindy esata card no longer worked due to driver incompatibility so I needed to download the latest Mac OS X 10.6 beta driver version 1.1.11 from the following location: https://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=32&cat=3&os=3 and now it works again. Phew!

Mean people, mean people suck.