I have been running tow of my old 300GB HDD's in a RAID 0 array ever since I have been running my new Hackintosh. The box has been fairly stable since I have built it, crashing around once a week randomly. There have been two instances however which have caused my machine to crash every time.

The first instance was when I was trying to run XP/Vista/any OS in a VM through VMWare or Parallels. When I would try to create a Virtual HDD on my RAID drive and run the OS from the Virtual disk, I could literally watch the memory meter rise in Activity monitor until opening Safari / Spotlight would cause the machine to crash. From then on I resulted to using physical HDD partitions to run VMs in and everything was kosher again.

The next instance, more recently, was when my computer seemed to crash every day while I was either sleeping or away at class. One day my roomie came up to me and was like, "Hey every time I try to gram so and so movie off of your computer over the network, it fails and I can't connect to your computer again for a few hours." It just so happens that these movies were stored on the RAID array. I replicated the situation and watched the memory meter spike during this disk access from the RAID disk. On cue, the computer crashed.

I then looked around the internet for driver issued with the SiI 3132 chipset and found many unhappy OS X users with SiI chipsets. After the most recent crash, my HDD's did not mount on boot. I decided to just run w/o them for awhile and the computer ran flawlessly for over a week, with XP open in a VM the whole time, which would normally cause a crash if it was open for more than a few hours.

I have since backed up everything on the RAID array, and recreated it with the software RAID built into OS X, created a VM with a virtual HDD and have been living happily ever since. I may even try overclocking my Q6600 again, as I have a feeling that the only reason my box ever crashed was the stupid RAID driver.

Is anyone else having issues with their SiI 3132 based RAID chipsets. When I purchased mine, I was recommended as one of the only ways to get RAID in OS X without spending a ton on a card.

I would personally just recommend using the OS's built in RAID utility.

-sdelano

the 32-bit sil3132 is causing crashes and freezes since leopard, if you use 4GB ram.
no more problems since I removed my sil3132 card. hopefully sil will release a 64bit driver soon.

Yep, 4GB RAM here...

In all reality though, would a PCIE card with this chipset even result in an increased performance over OS X'x built-in RAID utility? I mean, it's hooked up to a PCI-E X1 slot which has a bandwidth of 150Mb/s. Therefore each drive would only be getting 75Mb/s. SATAII has a bandwidth of 300Mb/s. I know OS X's built-in RAID is SOFTWARE, but this SiI adapter isn't a true hardware RAID either anyways.

Anyone have any further insight on this?

-sdelano

where do you have this weird info from ? those bandwith specs are absolutely wrong - have a look:

PCI Express Lanes-----bandwith per stream-----------bandwith duplex

1------------------------256 MB/s-------------------------512 MB/s
2------------------------512 MB/s----------------------------1 GB/s
4---------------------------1 GB/s----------------------------2 GB/s
8---------------------------2 GB/s----------------------------4 GB/s
16--------------------------4 GB/s----------------------------8 GB/s

it´s even very hard to reach the lowest capacity of 256 MB/s.

Don't use the SATARAID driver. I stupidly downloaded this because it was the most recently updated, and my machine would freeze at 2GB memory usage. Instead use the 1.1.9 BASE driver. I have pushed my machine up to 8GB of memory usage with this driver while cloning a disk with no freezes.

this not a solution in this case. we talked about a raid - imo the base driver doesn´t work with SIL3132 raid cards

1.1.9 as well as 1.5.16 are both crashing following way on AMD based systems:

Process: SATARaid5Daemon [138]
Path: /Applications/Utilities/Silicon Image/SATARaid5/SATARaid5Daemon
Identifier: SATARaid5Daemon
Version: ??? (???)
Code Type: PPC (Translated)
Parent Process: launchd [1]

Date/Time: 2008-12-15 23:29:09.690 +0100
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.5 (9F33)
Report Version: 6

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 translate 0xb81908fc 0xb8000000 + 1640700
1 ??? 0x8fe0e723 0 + 2413881123
2 ??? 0x8fe0e809 0 + 2413881353
3 ??? 0x8fe04102 0 + 2413838594
4 ??? 0x8fe07b5f 0 + 2413853535
5 ??? 0x8fe01872 0 + 2413828210
6 ??? 0x8fe01037 0 + 2413826103

Thread 0 crashed with X86 Thread State (32-bit):
eax: 0x00000001 ebx: 0x8fe12d91 ecx: 0x8fe12e76 edx: 0x8fe2fc20
edi: 0x00000001 esi: 0xb8000334 ebp: 0xbfffe668 esp: 0xbfffe600
ss: 0x0000001f efl: 0x00010213 eip: 0xb81908fc cs: 0x00000017
ds: 0x0000001f es: 0x0000001f fs: 0x00000000 gs: 0x00000037
cr2: 0xffe178e4

Binary Images:
0xb8000000 - 0xb81d7fe7 translate ??? (???) /usr/libexec/oah/translate

however, 1.5.16 is working fine on Core2Duo based systems, even used for Silicon Images si3531 SATA PCI express card.
(all you have to do as usual, add 0x35311095 into Info.plist of SiliconImage3132.kext)

written on SIL website :

Please contact the external enclosure or hard disk drive manufacturer for problems specific to the device that may have surfaced under Mac OS X Leopard but, not previously present under Tiger.

I discussed that with a few companies that are offering the sil3132 over here - some of them denied that this problems exists. one of five admitted that they have to discuss that with SIL.

this is ridicolous that a company like SIL wasn´t able to release a working driver in the last 16 months.

I bought a TR4m enclosure and it comes with this card. I used the driver from the driver CD and since then, I have had 3 HDD crash events (freeze and OSX can't mount the drive any more) and lost about 2.5 TB of data. I always suspect there are some problems with my hackintosh set up, but now I know it is probably the RAID card that's the culprit. I will steer away from this CARD from now on.

siliconimage3132r5_15160.zip is working without any problems.
Both Leopard (10.5.8) and Snow Leopard (10.6.1).

I think this was the intended link above: http://www.siliconimage.com/support/search...;cat=3&os=3

This page very clearly states the driver is 32 bit- how big of an issue is that for 10.6? I've use the same driver in 10.5.6 for a long time with no issues.

Sorry guys, It was too early to post (it seems)

That driver causes too many problems including one kernel crash. Apple website lists this card (chip) as one of those unsupported under Snow Leopard.

I removed the card from the system. I ordered JM 363 card. Hope that will work better.

Has someone tried SiI 3132 Mac OS X 10.6 & 10.6.1 BASE (non-RAID) BETA (10/8/2009) new driver on 64bit SL?
http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/SiI3132_1...il_Pkg_BETA.zip

didn't work for me. seems to be a 32bit version

Any updates on the 64bit kext?