battista Posted December 31, 2008 Share Posted December 31, 2008 I would like to use the four additional sata ports on my gigabyte ga45 dq6 board. Is there any chance the get these ports working with leopard? If not, what is the most inexpensive way to get additional sata ports with a "supported" hardware, that does not conflict with the existing system (what hardware can I buy) ? Please don't recommend 300$ controllers ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vladthebad Posted January 26, 2009 Share Posted January 26, 2009 If thats the board I'm thinking... you need more than Silicon image support, you need Jmicron support, AND silicon image support. The Jmicron controller creates the sata ports.... and the silicon image port multipliers double 2 into 4. The silicon image drivers aren't the greatest. the Jmicron drivers are worse than that. I have few problems with my PCI-X (NOT PCIe) silicon image 3124 card. 2 internal sata ports, 2 esata ports. (Yeah, I wish it was just 4 internal ports too) It does hardware RAID and is bootable as well. It was about $50 GOOD options... are to buy a supported SAS or SATA controller.... but I'm not going to recommend a card I haven't used, other than to say the LSI 1068e 8 port SAS chip... is used in the apple Xserve. Any motherboard with an LSI 1068e or any card with an LSI1068e should work. A few cards that use another processor to drive the 1068e and to make it a hardware RAID card... MAY not work unless you can disable or set the IOprocessor to bypass, to run it in JBOD mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thorazine74 Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 I think jmicron supports port multipliers, not sure which kind are that si chipset, but you'd have a better chance of getting it to work in ahci mode, I doubt it would work with the jmicronata kext. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
battista Posted January 27, 2009 Author Share Posted January 27, 2009 Thanks for your suggestion, but SAS stroage and controllers are NOT a good idea, as they blow my financial budget and the drives are 1 euro per Gigabyte. Anyway, I already have 10 500gb SATA 300 hard disks and a backplane system so I would like to use them. The only thing I don't know is how to get the necessary number of free SATA ports. Aren't there any cheap SATA 8-port controllers (such as marvell, 100 euro level) that work fine with leopard or controllers where working 3rd party drivers can be used? Any other recommendations? What about these Highpoint controllers? I heard some of them have native leopard support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
battista Posted January 28, 2009 Author Share Posted January 28, 2009 I just read another forum entry in efi-x.com. Are these http://www.siliconimage.com/support/search...=103&cat=24 drivers you can use with leopard or is this only an administration tool ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thorazine74 Posted January 28, 2009 Share Posted January 28, 2009 You should need no drivers for the port multiplier chipset but for the controller is connected to, like vladthebad said, the SilI sits between the JMicron and the ports acting more or less like a USB Hub but for the SATA ports, its handled transparently by the controller, but I'm pretty sure it will not work in IDE mode, only in AHCI mode, the JMicron supports port multiplier, if the AHCI driver supports it too maybe you will see all the ports, if not maybe you will only see the 2 real ones or maybe none at all. Check the BIOS settings too, I think that board have some strange options regarding the SATA ports. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nano2nd Posted January 28, 2009 Share Posted January 28, 2009 The Silicon Image 3132 chipset works OK and has official Mac drivers. Search the forum for more on the topic. The one problem though is that the system becomes unstable if you have more than 2GB RAM. For a while I used a PCIe Sil3132 card to enable a RAID 0 boot partition but random crashes etc made me revert to standard SATA. These cards are dirt cheap - have a look on ebay. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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