I purchased a Sil3132 raid 1/0 card. I managed to boot leo4allv3 from it just fine. As soon as I go over 3gb memory usage, the computer freeze.

After some testing, I have no issue at all when the card is not in the computer. It seems like the silicon driver does not like high memory usage.

I can live with the fact that a 10$ ebayed soft raid card does not handle 4gb+ ram easily. but I wont settle for 2gb of memory.

Can someone tell me from having tried it if a RocketRaid 2310 will handle 4gb+ of ram please? The investment is much greater and I would not want to waste cash on this.

Regards,

Giga-Byte P35-DS3L mb
Q6600
2x2gb Crucial @ 667Mhz

Your system freeze (was it a kernel panic?) may not have anything to do with the Sil3132.
If your mobo has a built-in JMicron JMB363 controller that's enabled in your BIOS, this has been known
to cause problems with Hacks thant have more than 2GB RAM.

no KP .. just freeze ..

I deactivated any IDE controller in my bios and removed any related kext. Jmicron viaata, etc.

I have a leopard installation on an independant sata disk (non raid). If I boot it and fill up the ram with the sil kext loaded it freeze. If I take th card off it works fine.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Regards

I liked my Si 3132 BASE so much (i boot from it, its fast), I decided to purchase another one for its RAID 5 feature. Now I have exactly the same problem as you, whenever memory usage goes near 3GB, the OS either completely freeze (90% of times), or reset (10%) with no traceable logs in console at all.

I can reproduce the problem easily, just launch any applications until memory usage goes near 3GB and it will guarantee to happen. I tried unplug everything from the card, remove the card, and remove the driver, all resolve the problem. So I am 100% sure its the driver problem. The odd thing is that the BASE driver works fine with 8GB of RAM, of course, you don't get the RAID function with BASE driver.

Any suggestion for a possible solution or for a good PCI or PCIe card that support software RAID, and eSATA multiplexer?

The card itself is cheap, but the Multiplexer and 4 X WD HD is kind of heavy investment for me, and I really want to make this work as RAID 5.

Thanks

I finally gave up RAID 5 idea, use the BASE driver and set up a RAID 0 + 1 in Disk Utility. Although I loss 1 HD's capacity (total 2 drives), it is actually over 100% faster than Si 3132's RAID 5. I think I will stick with this setup until Silicon Image fix the driver issue, as well as improve their RAID 5 performance.

macbrush, which brand of sil3132 card are you using - is it PCIe or PCI.
Also, can you do RAID 0 & boot from it?

After searching a lot, I ordered a Highpoint Rocketraid 2302 4 Channel 2INT 2EXT SATA2 RAID Controller Card PCI-E1X 0/1/5/10/JBOD. 127$ cnd + 10$ shipping.

I should have it maybe today or tomorrow. I saw some success using it in osx with 4+gb of ram and they seem to keep osx drivers up to date.

I will definitly post my result here.

Regards

They are Syba brand, one SATA and another eSATA. I think all Si 3132 is PCIe since the chipset was developed specifically for PCIe. Sorry, since the RAID driver isn't PAE compatible, so I had to stick with BASE driver, and run OS X built-in RAID instead.

I received my rocketraid 2302 pci-e x1 card. So far so good ! .. I connected, built the array in the card bios and installed the drivers on the osx running on my standard SATA disk. rebooted and the raid showed up. loaded the memory to 4gb/4gb and no crash !! (would have crashed with sil3132 connected).

Next step is to fully reinstall on the raid array and see how everything goes when booting from it.

I will only post further reply to this post if I have more issues.

Good news realbuz - please LMK if your are able to install OS X on your array connected to the 2302.

A1 for running / booting osx from 2302 raid 0.

Any glitches with the Seagate drives on that RocketRAID? I've seen some compatibility
issues with various drives/RAID cards (There's usually a compatibility list for drives,
but they are rarely up to date).

well right now I'm running 2 seagate 750gb in raid 0 without any issues.

Regards

realbuz,

What procedure did you use to install OS X so you could boot from the 2302's RAID 0?

I thought the only RockedRAID that you could boot RAID from was the 3522.

1. install the card and build the raid in the card BIOS (0, 1, 5 whichever you want)
2. from an already working OSX hard disk, install the driver OSX driver for the rocketraid 2310 card
3. partition and format your newly detected volume (I used guid)
4. install EFI and make the new volume bootable (many good guide to find out how on this forum)
5. connect another hard disk on non raid controller and install a clean new OSX (this will be your source OS to clone from)
6. install the card driver and any other drivers you want on your final OS
7. reboot with the first OSX
8. clone with superduper or any similar tools using the clean hard disk install as source and the raid array as destination
9. make sure your BIOS boot sequence is using the raid card first OR disconnect the two independant hard disk from the system
10. enjoy OSX on your new RAID

note. There are supposed to be some other method that would not require using a clean source but I didn't manage to get them to work like loading the driver from your install CD shell (some dependency problem)

Let me know if you have any questions.

In case anybody's interested, I've successfully set up a server around the Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 card. I chose that card because of the low price and OS X driver availability :-)

Components:
- Asus P5WD2-Deluxe (i955X) motherboard
- 4GB RAM
- Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 controller
- 2x36GB WD Raptor
- 4x500GB WD RE II
- JaS 10.5.4

The plan was to have the OS installed on and boot from a RAID 1 made using the two 36GB drives and have a data drive in RAID 5 using the four 500GB disks.

Here's what I did:

1) Added the RocketRaid drivers to the installation DVD...
- Grab the driver installation files from http://www.hptmac.com
- Extract the rr2320.kext file from the dmg (open the DMG, look in the rr232x.pkg, grab the .pax file, extract and you'll have the .kext)
- Open the JaS ISO file and copy the /System/Library/Extensions.mkext file to your harddisk (create a directory and place it in, we'll extract its contents in a second)
- From a Shell prompt, unpack the Extensions.mkext file:
# sudo su -
# cd <directory where Extensions.mkext file was copied to>
# mkextunpack -d . Extensions.mkext
- Copied the rr2320.kext file to the above directory
- Rebuilt the kext cache:
# kextcache -m Extensions.kext <directory name>
- Replaced the Extensions.mkext file on the DVD and burned it to a disc
Optional: Add a copy of the rr2320.kext file to the DVD root, we'll need it later. Otherwise we'll extract it from the mkext again.


2) Install OS
- Powered up system, created the RAID 1 array
- Booted from JaS DVD
- Disk Utility can now see the RAID 1 array. I've partitioned it as HFS+J and proceeded with the installation...
- When installation was completed (and during the 30s countdown), opened up a Terminal window

3) Patched OS to include RocketRaid driver
Freshly installed OS needs the kext too so I've simply grabbed again the Extensions.mkext file again from the DVD, copied it to a temporary folder on the RAID Volume, unpacked it and copied the rr2320.kext file to the /System/Library/Extensions folder.
I could've placed a copy of the kext on the DVD too, but I forgot to do it and didn't want to burn the disc again
Don't forget to delete the /System/Library/Extensions.mkext cache on the RAID volume

Reboot...

I hope this helps - see attached picture.

Please also read this (this is how I got started): http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=66345

rsandru,

Thanks for the info - what are performance numbers like? Have you benched RAID 0?

Hi Vlad!

Sorry but I've got no spare drives to try a RAID 0 - my boot volume is a RAID 1 made using my old 36GB Raptors so compared to the more recent drives they probably won't shine in terms of performance.

If you'd still like RAID 1 or RAID 5 numbers, please let me know what benchmark you'd like me to run!

Kind regards,
Robert

Hi Rsandru,

Is any possible for useing this way to creative an retail Leopard DVD?
And useing with boot132 bootable disc to creative an retail install by the 2320 card for raid 0 installation?

rsandru
I've been to RR support site. I found it interesting that RR2320 is available for Powermac G5, available for leopard too.

Is there any chance that this driver is somehow adapted for PowerMac processors?

A little edit. Any info on 4+GB of RAM? Freezes?
I'm going to install and use 8GB

Otherwise i'd like to have this one too.

rsandru, I tried doing this for my RocketRAID 2640X4, but when I try rebuilding the kext cache, I get the following message in the terminal for all the kexts:

kernel extension /Users/vladimirmikle/Desktop/JAS/WriteProtectedMediaDriver.kext is not authentic (check ownership and permissions); skipping it and any plugins
couldn't find any valid bundles to archive