Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Expresscard/34 esata controller available from Addonics

Boot OS X from ExpressCard

I really hope someone can help me :)

I have a Sil3132 ExpressCard for my Intel MacBook Pro that works perfectly with the drivers from the Sil site.

I would really like to boot OS X from the drive!

Have you found a solution for this?

Is there anything I can try?

Thanks
Martin
 
Well, I think you'll have to wait for EFI-based drivers from SiliconImage, otherwise you'll need to connect the hard disk via USB (if your external HDD enclosure has USB, too) to boot OS X off it.
 
Hey guys!
For all of you who wanted the Raid5 expresscard on their Mac, SiI has released a universal OS X driver for them a couple of days ago. Check http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=32&cid=3&ctid=2&osid=3

Too bad I chickened out and saved a few bucks ordering the non-raid version, bummer.
And if that weren't enough, I'm having trouble disconnecting it and afterwards reconnecting it, my MBP detects the card fine but not the drives attached to it. A reboot works, but it's really unpractical.

//edit, lol, they have the updated package of 8/14/2007 in their table, but the link give's a 404 atm :)
 
Thanks for the info. Although I regularly check their website for updates, I didn't notice the RAID update. Anyway, since I don't use the RAID version either, I still hope for a new release of non-RAID drivers (I wonder if they'll ever release EFI-based drivers).
 
-Cyman- said:
Thanks for the info. Although I regularly check their website for updates, I didn't notice the RAID update. Anyway, since I don't use the RAID version either, I still hope for a new release of non-RAID drivers (I wonder if they'll ever release EFI-based drivers).
Click to expand...
Right on, me too!
My card works fine at the moment, but it's still a shame we can't access S.M.A.R.T.-data from within OS X. Works from Windows, it's merely a driver issue. More interestingly, FirmTek seems to have solved the issue with their SeriTek card, which I presume also uses the same SiI 3132-chip. I've tried uninstalling my SiI-drivers and use theirs, didn't work. Tried flashing my card with a SeriTek firmware upgrade, my MBP grey-screened me telling to hold the power button, and it didn't work. Too bad :-(

But as you said, a new driver would really be welcome, yet I don't think a driver update from them would allow EFI-based booting. The EFI-enabled driver would have to go inside the bootloader anyway, and that's Apple's job. I guess it won't happen till Apple includes eSATA ports of their own. In the meanwhile you could hack rEFIt or some grub-version to include the driver, but that's only for the brave few.
 
I was comparing the info.plist of kext files of the Sil3132 1.1.9 non-RAID drivers and the newly released 1.5.16 Sil3132r5 driver and found the following differences:

Where it says
Code: 
<key>IOPCIClassMatch</key>
<string>0x01800000</string>
in the plist file of the non-RAID drivers, there is no such key/string in the new RAID drivers.

Next, in the
Code: 
<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0x31321095 0x71321095</string>
section of the RAID drivers, you only find 0x31321095 in the non-RAID info.plist.

While the non-RAID driver value says 500, the Sil3132r5 driver is set at
Code: 
<key>IOProbeScore</key>
<integer>0</integer>
.

The last interesting difference is to be found in this string:
Code: 
<key>Physical Interconnect Location</key>
<string>Internal/External</string>
, where the non-RAID drivers only shows External by default (I edited mine to Internal to show up the partitions as an internal HDD, which in my opinion is better).

I wonder what happens if I use the kext file of the new RAID drivers with my non-RAID card, only with adjusted/edited values like using SiliconImage3132 and com.SiliconImage.driver.Si3132 for the
Code: 
<string>SiliconImage3132r5</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.SiliconImage.driver.Si3132r5</string>
sections.

Would this work or wouldn't that change anything? I also wonder what happens what the Internal/External string does. How does it detect that it's an external or an internal drive connected to the card?
And how about flashing the BIOS from non-RAID to RAID - is this possible?
 
Nice work Cyman!
-Cyman- said:
Where it says
Code: 
<key>IOPCIClassMatch</key>
<string>0x01800000</string>
in the plist file of the non-RAID drivers, there is no such key/string in the new RAID drivers.

Next, in the
Code: 
<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0x31321095 0x71321095</string>
section of the RAID drivers, you only find 0x31321095 in the non-RAID info.plist.
Click to expand...
That's odd. According to http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENT...CIDrivers/pci_device/chapter_4_section_2.html it's there to identify a PCI device. Perhaps this is some kind of separate RAID-chip?
Code: 
<key>Physical Interconnect Location</key>
<string>Internal/External</string>
, where the non-RAID drivers only shows External by default (I edited mine to Internal to show up the partitions as an internal HDD, which in my opinion is better).
Click to expand...
I don't really see the use of this option, but it probably has to do something with caching and being able to eject the disks. I'd leave it at external actually.

I wonder what happens if I use the kext file of the new RAID drivers with my non-RAID card, only with adjusted/edited values like using SiliconImage3132 and com.SiliconImage.driver.Si3132 for the
Code: 
<string>SiliconImage3132r5</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.SiliconImage.driver.Si3132r5</string>
sections.
-snip-
And how about flashing the BIOS from non-RAID to RAID - is this possible?
Click to expand...
Don't know. If you want your non-raid card to work as raid you'd have to edit the PCI ID's, but leave the names intact with r5. You'd probably also need to re-flash your device. Most likely the raid card has an extra mathematical chip inside of it, and it's not unthinkable you would fry your card by flashing a wrong firmware on it. I looked at the SiI site for some 3132-documents, and a couple of them mentioned raid was possible. Perhaps it's in there and they're only charging extra for firmware, perhaps not. You find out and report back? :)
 
I think I will try modifying the RAID kext file first, before I fubar my SATA card, although I doubt that the hardware differs from the RAID layout. I just need confirmation from someone who flashed a non-RAID card with a RAID BIOS.
 
Booting XP from external eSATA

Somehow I wasn't able to run Windows XP from my external drive, but yesterday I got it working.

1 - I installed XP with the eSATA drive connected to another pc.
2 - Installed apple's bootcamp drivers + siliconimage 3132 drivers.
3 - Connected the drive to my MBP and selected a Windows partition on my internal drive from rEFIt.
4 - rEFIt booted from the eSATA drive.

Something is missing from this list since the external drive wouldn't be visible
without having a second partition with a legacy OS on a media that EFI can see.

That legacy OS/partition triggers the EFI legacy BIOS emulation which in turn loads the bios drivers for the eSATA expresscard.
I think the eSATA drive becomes the primary drive and that's why it booted right away.

Windows XP runs incredibly fast form this eSATA drive!

I wonder why it didn't work the first time...
 
Thanks for the update Lucidmyth. I need to get my MBP repaired, I wish they would replace it with the new Santa Rosa one, but well, I know they won't. I still need to test the driver mod. I was busy in the last weeks.
 
New RAID5 drivers

Thanks krisis1 for the new driver info.
Today I flashed my RAID5 ExpressCard from BASE back to RAID5.
And it works like a charm with the new drivers!
Seems like everything works out of the box now.

I'm also retrying to boot OSX from the drive over eSATA. I really want it to happen one way or the other.
 
I only need to know if it's also possible to flash the standard card to the RAID drivers or if this isn't possible due to a different hardware layout of the card. Would the flashing with the RAID drivers require a RAID system or could I also connect a single external hard drive?
 
Not sure if your card supports both BASE and RAID. But a RAID capable card doesn't need a raid array in order to work. I have flashed it back to RAID but still connect only one drive to it.
 
New RAID5 driver

Another note on the newly released driver.
After flashing my ExpressCard and installing the new drivers the card no longer supports ejecting but still has the removable disk icon. Maybe it's because Internal/External thing in:

<key>Physical Interconnect Location</key>
<string>Internal/External</string>

Changing it to External only might fix this, changing it to Internal only does not affect the disk icon.
 
For all people having a Delock 61386 eSATA ExpressCard, you can now also download the drivers for Mac OS X from the Delock website. It also says that it can be flashed to RAID, so my question has been answered by the manufacturer of the card!
 
Not to pour cold water on this thread and dash the hopes of everyone trying to get their eSATA drives to boot, but logically, you need hardware support in the EFI for your particular hardware to have any chance of booting.

Any software drivers loaded are only activated after the operating system is already booting, which means they have no effect whatsoever on your ability to boot. Firmware flashing on the card seems to be getting closer to the answer, but the version of EFI on your machine is probably the key. It would take a braver person than I to hack around with the EFI on the MBP.

Whilst hunting around the web looking for clues as to whether eSATA could even boot on the MBP, I found a number of discussions, which seemed to indicate that it is a lottery as to which eSATA card would get you a bootable system, even if your EFI had rudimentary eSATA support. Most cards seemed to be based on the Silicon Image chip. This chip is the least likely to be successful, if I remember rightly, although it worked for me, even with an unsupported card.

Even though I was successful, the miserable I/O benchmarks means that I would probably be better off booting from USB with the one-port card I have. A two-port version with drivers might give me a worthwhile system, however.
 
@weckart:

As you have a MBP SR, it seems that booting off eSATA works for you. I don't know what kind of MBP Lucidmyth has, but as I understood, it works for him, too. When I get back home later today, I'll flash my ExpressCard, install the RAID drivers and try it on my MBP C2D w/o SR. I'll report back if it works. I recently updated the EFI firmware, maybe this makes it possible.
 
weckart:
Looks like your APIOTEK card is based on the JMicron JMB 360 chipset.
Sil 3132 owners are still out of luck.

Cyman:
Unfortunately I have an older MacBookPro 1,1. And Booting OS X doesn't work for me due to the lack of EFI support. OS's that support BIOS legacy booting work perfectly.

Still on the hunt for a bootable card I contacted Firmtek about their EFI support status:
Code: 
Hello,
Thank you for contacting FirmTek. The SeriTek/2SM2-E does not
currently support boot functionality with the MacBook Pro. The
FirmTek boot code works with PowerPC Open Firmware. The Intel based
Mac Pro uses EFI instead and does not support Open Firmware. As a
result, the SeriTek/2SM2-E does not boot on Intel based Macintosh
models.

FirmTek is working to solve this issue in the future.

Regards,

Michael
FirmTek Support

Of course the line "FirmTek is working to solve this issue in the future." is the interesting one.
 
I see that weckart's card has just one eSATA port - I didn't notice this before. Then I guess, we'll just have to wait that the guys at SeriTek (or someone else) release something that all Sil3132 owners can make use of.
 
For those who are gonna do RAID via their Expresscard eSATA controller, remember that the Expresscard slot uses a 1x PCIe (or single PCI Express lane) connection to the system bus. A single PCIe lane can get data rates of up to 2.5Gbits/s, as compared to a single eSATA port which has data rates that can go up to 3 Gbits/s. So you won't be able to get the same RAID headroom that you'll get using a MacPro and an eSATA RAID controller on a 4x or 8x PCIe slot.

The Expresscard slot is also slower than FW800 too. FW800 data can go up to 3.2Gbits/s. IMHO the only reason to go with an Expresscard eSATA controller is because the eSATA enclosures are cheaper than FW800 ones. (Hardware RAID is nice, but if you can't easily do SMART monitoring, it's moot, IMHO)

I was quite disappointed when I got my Expresscard eSATA controller and found out that benchmarks of a SATA drive connected to it wasn't dramatically different from the FW800 drive's benchmarks.
 
Tastannin said:
The Expresscard slot is also slower than FW800 too. FW800 data can go up to 3.2Gbits/s. IMHO the only reason to go with an Expresscard eSATA controller is because the eSATA enclosures are cheaper than FW800 ones. (Hardware RAID is nice, but if you can't easily do SMART monitoring, it's moot, IMHO)

I was quite disappointed when I got my Expresscard eSATA controller and found out that benchmarks of a SATA drive connected to it wasn't dramatically different from the FW800 drive's benchmarks.
Click to expand...

Could you post your benchmarsk? I was planning on getting an eSATA expresscard but if it truly isn't any faster than I want to reconsider.
 
Interesting thread.

I too would like to see these benchmarks. I'm considering getting a RAID 0/1 enclosure (to run in mirrored mode) to use with a new MBP. I have to decide whether to go with an eSATA or FW800 setup like http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW924AL2K/ or http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8387284&type=product&id=1179876288679 or http://www.amazon.com/Maxtor-Touch-Turbo-External-C01W010/dp/B000BW32IY (the reviews aren't so good for this one).

Thanks!
 
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Benchmarks

Some benchmarks from a MacBook Pro 1.1:

For me on an older model, eSATA is king.
 

Attachments

  • Internal_hdd_small.png
    Internal_hdd_small.png
    20.8 KB · Views: 216
  • USB_st332062_small.png
    USB_st332062_small.png
    21.5 KB · Views: 157
  • eSATA_st332062_small.png
    eSATA_st332062_small.png
    20.5 KB · Views: 132
slightly off topic, but...

i was wondering if someone could help me with this.
i was an earlier poster in this thread.

i have an addonics eSata expresscard (the one that is capable of raid5), two 500Gb drives sitting in a storage tower, and an addonics 5x1 port multiplier. each drive is plugged into the PM, and then one cable plugs into the express card.

i recently bought the second drive (the single drive setup was working perfectly) and cannot seem to copy directly from one drive to the other. i want to manually mirror the primary drive once every few days for backup purposes. it always gets about 1GB into the copy, and then stops and hangs the finder.

any ideas?

thanks
rhys
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back