On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 10:40 PM, M J Poff
<email@hidden> wrote:
On 27/07/2008, at 5:08 PM, Chris Williams wrote:
On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 6:29 PM, M J Poff
<email@hidden> wrote:
On 24/04/2008, at 7:21 AM, Peter Schwenk wrote:
On Apr 23, 2008, at 3:07 PM, Mike Visconti wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 9:55 AM, John Slaughter <
email@hidden> wrote:
You are correct, the Sonnet cards do report SATA and SATA II drives to the system as SCSI devices. I have the tow-port Tempo SATA E2P which works great on my Mac Pro. Wish I had got the E4P 4-port version though.
I don't understand your reference to a "matching card" though. Why wouldn't they be usable? They appear to work just fine here.
-John
Wouldn't that be true only if the drive was in a RAID? If the drive is just a drive plugged into a SATA interface, moving it to another SATA interface wouldn't matter.
I'd like to be able to make backups (bootable ideally) that could be moved to another machine without needing to take the server apart (or purchase additional cards). Also, the Firmtek cards work just fine in the Mac Pros, but don't appear in an Xserve.
The Sonnet E2P does not work in an Intel Xserve either, even though SonnetTech have twice confirmed that it does. The card I have, does work in a MacPro.
We have tried the Sonnet, Firmtek and Granite Digital eSATA adapters in Intel Xserves, none of them even show up in System Profiler. Even though those cards work on the Mac Pro they just aren't compatible with the Intel Xserve.
As far as we can tell the only external eSATA solution that works with Intel Xserves are the Highpoint RocketRAID cards. If anyone else has had luck with other adapters we'd love to hear it.
The local Apple dealer tells me they have a Sonnet RAID card that works in the Xserve Intel. It's a model around the US$500 range though. Not sure if it's external though, they may run the cables out through the other expansion card grille area. The Xserve is quite a different architecture from the MacPro, and if you know the MacPro, you can't assume for the Xserve.
One hurdle I struck was that the software to set the Lane width on the PCI-e bus, "Expansion Slot Utility" (which is in the System/Library/Core Services directory) - "Does not run on this machine" if you try to launch it on an Xserve. I am not sure if that means the Xserve sets the Lanes itself, or an oversight means, there is no way to set the Lane Width on the Xserve with the std software. That was with OS X 10.5, but haven't tried with
10.5.4.
If anyone can shed light on the Lane Width issue, it may be a start.
J Poff.
The Expansion Slot Utility also isn't compatible with the newer Mac Pros released this year or the Xserve. The lane widths are fixed on the newer Mac Pros, I bet the same is true of the Intel Xserve and that is why the Expansion Slot Utility doesn't work there either.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304122If you find out what card your Apple dealer says would work I'd love to know the model number. Although at $500 you might as well go for the HightPoint Rocket RAID 2304 in JBOD mode, it can be had for around $200.
Cheers,
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Chris Williams
IrisInk
Portland, OR
