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Stable SiI3132 Drivers for Mac Pro?
- Thread starter Transeau
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I built my own quad bay hot swappable SATA enclosure about a year ago and got a 4 port eSATA card to go in my G5. It worked wonderfully and reliably. When I got my Mac Pro I got a PCIe SATA card for cheap and decided to put a port multiplier into the drive enclosure to have only one cable, I don't need RAID speeds - just lots of storage. To make a long story short the UB Sil3132 drivers kp'd me all the time and I had to stop using the enclosure all together. Every last kp log pointed to the Sil3132 drivers. I went through two SATA card makers but the hardware looked identical and used the same drivers. I got the exact same results. AFAICT the Silicon Image drivers need lots of work for MacPros. I finally saw that Seritek released a final firmware for their PCIe SATA card that supports port multipliers. I grabbed one from macsales.comhttp://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/SATA2SE2E/ for $100, about double the other 2 port cards, and all works perfectly now. The ironic thing is that Seritek uses the exact same hardware that the other two cards did but they make all their own drivers and firmware. There are no drivers to install, they load off the ROM on the card. You need to contact tech support to get the latest firmware flasher to work with the Mac Pro but I am incredibly happy with the card now and 4 days w/o a kp when I was getting them every couple of hours with the Silicon Image drivers.
-Jerry C.
PS. The Seritek card also can pass SMART status off to OSX, unlike the SilImage drivers, and they are supposedly working on making it bootable on MacPros too.
eMagine
macrumors regular
i've had the same problem with my Addonics esata pcie card. the sil3132 driver 1.1.6 has never worked for me. Some say 1.1.8 will fix the crashing problem, but i'm not going to wait any longer.
i just ordered the firmtek card today, will give an update when it gets here..
Yeah the Addonics card was the second one I tried. I am using an Addonics port multiplier in my enclosure and they do have excellent support and service as I found out in a series of email exchanges with them. They offered to refund my money w/o hassle. It isn't so much their fault, they don't make the drivers. I would contact firmtek support and tell them you just ordered the card and need the latest 5.2.0 firmware flasher and drivers. It is pretty new and cards in the pipeline may still have the older ones on them. If they send it out to you now you can use the card sooner when you get it.
-Jerry C.
-Jerry C.