Adding PCIe SATA Card... will any brand work?

[supercooled]

Hi,

I'm looking into adding an expansion SATA card and wondered if any product on the market will work . I have an Early 2008 MP. The "Mac" brands from OWC for instance cost quite a bit but locally I can get one for 1/3 the price.

Thanks

 

[brand]

In general if a card is supported by Mac OS then it will list it in the specifications. Does the card your looking at list it in the specifications? Seems simple enough to me.

 

[matthewtoney]

Cheap eSATA

While I can't make any promises, my experience has been that using any of the cheap PCIe cards that have the SiliconImage 3132 chipset works as long as you install the drivers from SonnetTech for the "Temp E2P" card. (I have two different cards like this and both have worked fine with those drivers)

 

[rtrt]

a

 

[matthewtoney]

Snow Leopard

Granted, but I'm an ADC person and am running Snow Leopard - those SonnetTech 3132 drivers work just fine in 10.6

 

[rtrt]

a

 

[flatfoot]

SiliconImage haven't updated the irSI3132 drivers for years (seriously).
But SonnetTech have and I'm pretty sure they're gonna keep that up.

I use a cheap SI3132 card with the SonnetTech drivers without any probs under Leopard, too.

Edit:
So, SonnetTech won't update their Si3132 drivers. FirmTek, however, did. Unfortunately, their driver causes kernel panics with my cheap card.
But after some research I found that there is native support, also in SL, for the JMB362 by JMicron. (see xlr8yourmac.com)
Over here in Germany, however, there are only 1-port cards featuring the 2-port chip JMB362...

But for those of you who live in the US or are willing to order from there, I found this.
Using a backplane adapter for the internal port, you get 2 SATA-ports that should also work under Snow Leopard.

Since I don't know for sure if it works, I'm going to order here in Germany, because it's easier to return if it doesn't. And if it does and I want two ports I could also buy another 1-port card, since the backplane adapter would also block one of the PCIe-slots.