XServe G4 2.3 DP - external sata card?

hello!
I'm looking at 4 port pci-x sata cards for an Apple xServe G5 2.3 DP.
I have seen the "Sonnet Tempo X4P External 4 Port SATAII" mentioned in a lot of places so am aware of that, but it's relatively expensive.
Raidon also offer a card - Raidon SATA II PCI-X Card 4 x eSATA Port 64bit - which seems to be the same. It doesn't officially say "supports mac" on their product page, but then in their downloads section there are mac drivers etc for it. One of their sales reps pointed me to it when I mentioned the Sonnet Temp card above (because the cost of the Sonnet is a lot higher in comparison).
Has anyone had experience with the Raidon in an xserve??
regan

hi daddyPaycheck,
have you used a sonnet unit before?
I've got a question regarding the hot-swap function.
If you've got 2 drives in a Raid 1, and one drive failes, you stick a new drive in - will the sonnet card recognize the new drive without having to restart either the mac or the external enclosure??
I know some enclosures require you to restart the enclosure if the drive being replaced has been part of a Raid or it won't recognise it.
regan

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Suggestions for: external SATA array with a PCIe SATA card??

Seems like this would be a good idea but have no idea what hardware to be considering.
external SATA array with a PCIe SATA card
Thanks
John

Seems like this would be a good idea but have no idea
what hardware to be considering.
external SATA array with a PCIe SATA card
Thanks
John
I purchased and internal raid kit, Rocket Raid 2320 card and Maxupgrades kit. This guy will help you get your equipment running with over the phone with personal customer service. He has external configs also.
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category _id=313&CFID=3649947&CFTOKEN=58951206
Good Luck
Z1&V1user

MP early 2008: Seeking advice on e-sata card and external enclosure for backup purposes

Hi everyone
I currently have my home folder on an internal 3TB drive which is SuperDuper'd every day to an identical internal drive.
I am running out of space and need to think of a longer-term solution. I will have to use several large drives - one drive for photos, one for iTunes library, one for documents etc. Each drive would be mirrored with SuperDuper to something like an IcyCUBE and connected through a PCIE e-sata card. I'm not considering any form of RAID solution.
Is Sonnet still the card manufacturer to go for - if so, is the E2P the card I need? Are there alternative cards and if so what should I look for (certain chipsets perhaps)?
Are there any known compatibility problems between certain cards and certain drive enclosures?
Is there a way to have only one cable between the computer and the enclosure or must each drive have its own connection?
Thanks very much in advance for any help with this.
Cheers
Philip

E2P is a low end two port card with limitation in bandwidth. Maybe you want 4-port card to give you more growth and expansion.
Green drives may or may not be ideal for your media storage needs. Cheaper. When floods drove up prive of drives in Sept 2011 they become more popular as Black 2TB price went to $270
Clone is one thing. Mirror is entirely different tech.
The issue are avoid those name brand WD and Seagate or LaCie enclosures.
Every new OS and Mac Pro has had some sort of change to drivers and such.
4TB drives should be part of your storage strategy.
Software RAID is fine with daily or as needed backups. Clone at least one, and TimeMachine for hourly. But never ever have only one backup set. One set should be off line and they would be rotated. For safety sake and avoid the all your eggs in one basket. Which is why yes internal is convenient but external drives and also drive enclosure that allows swapping.
A good USB3 + eSATA card is the most popular I think right now today.
And use Green 3-4TB for backup, and WD Black or enterprise for internal storage.

Sata Card for Dual 2.5 External Drives

Loking for a four port card that works with my G5 and have no idea what I need PCIX etc.
Looking to buy it here.
http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Criteria=SATA%20High%2DSpeed%20Contr oller%20Mac%20Cards&sort=a&pg=2
Thanks in advance, tried to search but could not find an answer.

Hi Michele
If you have the first generation of dual 2.5GHz G5s, you have PCI-X. If you have the later model, you have PCIe (PCI Express). You can check which you have by launching System Profiler (from the Apple menu - About This Mac - More Info).
Check the "machine model".
PowerMac 7,3 - early G5 - PCI-X
PowerMac 11.2 - late G5 - PCIe
MacGurus has more information on SATA card compatibility here.
I've used two SATA cards - the Seritek 1VE4 was okay, and supports external booting, but has problems with some Seagate drives. I'm now using a Lycom 4-port card, which supports port multiplication (so you can hook up to 5 drives per port with enclosures that support the feature).
Good luck!
Matt

External SATA RAID no longer works after 10.5.5 update

After updating to 10.5.5, my external RAID (Sbox) (RAID 10) is no longer recognized – The SATA card is functioning correctly – I can attach a single external SATA drive without problem – all ROM has been updated (working with Sonnet) and we confirmed the proper operation of the card. When the system is attached to the external RAID (with port replicator in enclosure) the card reports an error (both green and amber steady lights) and no activity on the transfer lights. Worked great under 10.5.4 on PowerMac. Any ideas??

It seems as though the problems are multiplying. Other programs are acting funny now - I had to force quit iTunes yesterday and then the Finder froze. Keyboard response was nil, so I couldn't Force quit the Finder, so I had to resort to more drastic measures. It took two reboots to get things running again. I'm going to review some other threads to see if there are any clues there, then probably wipe the hard drive and do a clean install if nothing else seems to address the issue.

No longer can write to my external SATA drive...

I was editing in FCP Studio 2 on a my MacPro 2x2.8 Quad Core, running MacOS 10.5.2, connected to a Highpoint X4 SATA drive, via the Highpoint RocketRaid 2314MS card. At some point the MAC detected a problem with the drive, and apparently it has changed the drive to read only. My timeline plays OK, but a lot of clips are marked as off-line, although I re-rendered them and they play. I ran the internet verification check from Highpoint, and it said the drive was normal. MAC disk utility will not let me change permissions on the external SATA. What should I do? Edit deadline approaching...there goes the weekend.

Well, the tech-support guy at Highpoint was going to e-mail me some steps, after he talked with someone about some MAC procedures. He thought that I would have to insert some code. There are three UNIX files on the drive that are trying to"fetch" something. Since my permissions have changed, I can't delete them. The e-mail from tech support never arrived last night. I'm in tthe CST zone, so it's still about two hours until Highpoint opens their doors. The RAID warning lights gave never changed from green to red. No beeps or chirps either. The on-line drive verification that took 3 hours, said the drive status was Normal.
Paul

Very slow external sata HD (lion)

Hi everybody!
It has been a while I am using a Netstor external HD (NR710C) 4x2TB WD Caviar black, RAID 10 (4TB total space, 2.71 Available, MacOS Extended Journaled).
It is conntected with the MacPro (MacPro 4,1 - early 2009) via a Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P pci card (drivers updated)
The OS installed is Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50d) on a OCZ SSD 250GB
What happen is that randomly the access to the external RAID HD is very slow and while finder try to open subfolder the entire system freeze for a minute or so. Soemtimes the opened folders looks empty and I have to wait a minute or so to see the content.
When I used Snow Leopard (installed on a 1TB HD) the access was always fluid and fast.
What I've done to try to solve this issue is:
Unchecked the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible) in the Energy Saver panel.
Changed slot of the PCI card
Changed sata plug and cable
Performed all the check disk possible
It happens as well that the copy/move of big folder (up to 800GB) is not always as fas as it should be.
Also, working with Lightroom (cache is on the SSD hd) is really frustrating due the slow access to all the files.
I was used to work directly on the external sata HD but now seems like if I have to move everything back on an internal HD.
Is there any other check I can perform to address this issue?
So many thanks.
Luca

The case has an eSata port and cable.
I've run a speed test (Xbench) on a 2TB internal drive and the external RAID.
Here is the result. It seems the speed is good.. is it correct?
System Info
Xbench Version
1.3
System Version
10.7.3 (11D50d)
Physical RAM
16384 MB
Model
MacPro4,1
Drive Type
WDC WD2001FASS-00W2B0
Disk Test
98.66
Sequential
175.94
Uncached Write
212.82
130.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
181.19
102.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
123.16
36.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
227.40
114.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
68.55
Uncached Write
21.96
2.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
441.42
141.31 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
155.38
1.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
242.86
45.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
System Info
Xbench Version
1.3
System Version
10.7.3 (11D50d)
Physical RAM
16384 MB
Model
MacPro4,1
Drive Type
Netstor H/W RAID10
Disk Test
97.50
Sequential
150.65
Uncached Write
182.92
112.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
144.62
81.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
104.63
30.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
216.80
108.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
72.07
Uncached Write
22.29
2.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
205.88
65.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
360.62
2.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
332.37
61.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Mac Pro SATA card

Hello to all you fellow Mac pro users
Recently I ran into a problem while upgrading my macs hard drive space and it wound up taking the life of my logic board. What I actually believe happened is that the controller card and thus my mac cannot read from any of the SATA or optical drives, as I can still boot from an external firewire and the graphics card seems to be in okay shape. Since purchasing a brand new mac pro logic board can be a pricey endeavor and one which I cant afford at the moment a friend suggested I install a controller card in the mac pros available pci-e slots, then through some sata cables boot my system and run the hard drives off that.
Anyone know if this is possible? Could I potentially save my beloved mac pro by operating my internal hdd's on a pci-e controller card?
If this is possible does anyone know of compatible pci-e SATA cards for my OS 10.5 2007 2xDual-core Mac Pro?
Thank you all so much for your time!

Hi,
I think the odds of every port on the Mac Pro being defective is quite low.
This is what I would try:
1. Insert a spare hard disk into the Mac Pro.
2. Boot from the FireWire disk.
3. Clone the FireWire disk to the spare internal disk using the restore tab in Disk Utility with the erase destination box checked.
4. Boot off of the new cloned HD and verify if it is bootable.
You may also want to reset the PRAM and leave the computer unplugged for an hour if the tip above does not help.
If this does not work and your motherboard really does have all defective SATA ports a bootable PCIe card may be a possibility. However, you should know that most of these cards require the boot disk on the card to be cloned from an existing working system disk. You would need to clone from the FireWire disk to make the HD on the card bootable and you would need to verify that the Mac OS X Boot EFI BIOS is loaded on the controller.
Here are some Mac Pro bootable controllers:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/4322/
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1680ix12/
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/3522/
As you can see most of the bootable Mac Pro controllers are not inexpensive.
Happy Hunting!

Upgrading DVD - Add SATA card & Drives -SIMPLE

I just thought I would pass on my successful upgrading and expansion of my Dual 2.0A G5. I'm not endorsing the following products - just want to identify what worked in my scenario.
I bought an internal Pioneer DVR-111D DVD burner (16X and Dual Layer capable) for under $50 new. I followed the owner's manual that came with the G5 for replacing your optical drive. The instructions are clear and straight forward. The only thing you must do first is pop out the disk tray on the new drive using the paper clip emergency eject hole (before you install the drive). Then lift up on the front plate/door to remove this plastic piece so that the tray will open and extend out of the bay without hitting the computer frame. Out with the old 4X and in with the New 16X/DL. Booted up, called up System Profile and there was my new drive. Burned a 4.17GB test disk at 16X and all worked A-OK. No drivers, no configuring, Notta. Just Plug and Play.
Next, I bought OWC's Serial ATA 2-Channel PCI controller card, also OWC's dual bay external SATA HD enclosure box and two Maxtor 300 GB SATA hard drives. At $110 per 300 GB internal drive price, I've decided to archive all my paying video projects to their own individual drives and store them. Between the drive and original tapes I'm covered and the price for storage only gets better.
Again I followed the G5 owner's manual for installing a PCI card. Here is the first snag to watch for IF your G5 has the PCI-X slots where Slots 2 & 3 are 64 bit, 100 MHz and Slot 4 is 64 bit, 133 MHz speed. This OWC SATA card was recognized in Sys Profile in Slot 4 but would not display the drives in the ATA Bus profile nor in Finder. I moved the card to Slot 3 and the 100 MHz speed was apparently more compatible. Sys Profile will identify the PCI Card as a SCSI type but don't let that throw you off. The ATA Bus Sys Profile recognizes two additional busses - one for each Maxtor drive ID'd as disk 2 and disk 3. Your DVD drive will also be listed as an ATA bus component.
The Maxtor internal drives I have come with two pair of jumper pins next to the cabling plugs. The drive arrived in a non-jumpered setting. You need to move the jumper over to the left pair to enable 1.5 Gb/s SATA transfer speeds. Its labeled J4 and also 1.5 Gb/s.
Lastly, this one bit me twice before I solved the mystery. I only had ONE drive show up in System Profile and on the Finder window initially. After much cable swapping, port swapping, rebooting, I went back INSIDE the dual bay enclosure to check cable connections. I noticed the data cable plug on the no-show drive was slightly askew due to other wiring pressing against it. I lined it back straight, powered everything up and that drive showed up now, BUT the other drive disappeared. Back in the box, yep, I bumped that ribbon cable plug on the other drive. Lined it back up and all works fine now. Watch out for these very "position sensitive" data cable plugs.
Summarizing: Even with the SATA card and dual external bay and the two new drives, there is NO configuring (other than giving a name to your new hard drives using Disk Utility). Truly PLUG & PLAY! The SATA card comes with a disk containing the instructions for setting up your 2 Channel card and dual drives in a RAID configuration. Very detailed. I'm not running RAIDs so I did not perform this very extensive procedure. Not sure if this would even be necessary once Disk Utility recognizes the new drives and DU has the ability to configure RAID drives much easier. Lastly, since I do a lot of video work and especially now in HD, larger drives are a necessity, BUT data speeds are also important with the high demands of realtime playback in FCP HD. I decided to go with the SATA bus speeds and drives rather than USB or Firewire drives to match the capabilities of my two internal SATA drives. If you plan to work in HD its probably a better way to go.
G5 Dual 2.0A / iBook G4 14" Mac OS X (10.4.7) 1.5GB ram/1.35TB SATA HDs/2x19"LCDs - 768MB ram/Airport, Sony Z1U, ADVC100

Kool, thanks

Mac Pro Boot from PCIe SATA Card

Is it possible to boot a Mac Pro from a PCIe Sata adapter? I bought a PCIe SATA III card to connect to my 64 Gb C300 SSD Drive. The internal SATA II drives are not fast enough to take full advantage of the C300.

Old Thread But Great News for MAc and PC Laptop Owners I know and trust this company and just bought this for my MAc Pro it boots up the hard drive a couple ways. In Mac hold down the option key and or once in MAc OS tell it to startup disk the external Sata (eSATA)
Worked 100% on my Mac Pro 2008 and this works on Laptops Mac and Windows
One catch its expensive but can go up to 6G WOOOOOOOOWs
Only card out of TON I have tried that will boot at least MAc OSX dunno about windows/Boot Camp but I think theoretically it will with the "Option" key wait and be patient and once you choose the sata drive maybe you can boot boot camp dunno? Actually yes you can once you set the startup disk to the esata boot camp windows will boot!!! Wooooooooot
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-6g/

External SATA drive setup

Just ordered a G-Tech external SATA with a PCI card:
G-SATA - 500GB 2-drive external SATA with cooling.
Any warnings, suggestions, formatting issues?
While I am here...any suggestions on scratch disc assignment
for this set up:
- 2 internal SATA (the original plus the Maxtor)
- 2 external firewire 800s
- (and soon) the g-tech external SATA

Verify the new disk is formatted Mac OS Extended. Journalling can be either on or off. It doesn't seem to matter with the faster drives.
Working media and render files should be on either your second internal disk or the new sata disk(s). Everything else should be distributed as your personal whims dictate.
cherrios,
∏

External SATA disks on MBP 15"

Hi all,
Is there any adaptor that I can buy that would allow me to connect an external SATA II disk or array to an MPB 15" Core 2 Duo?
I know that these machines have an expansion port, but it's not PCMCIA. Is there an adaptor that will do what I want?

Sonnet makes a Sata card for the MBP 34 port.

External SATA Drive

Do Macbook Pros have external SATA drives? I have the first build of the Macbook Pro. Thanks.

Your original post was a little unclear.
Cardbus won't work. That's basically PCMCIA - which is no longer on the machines.
For a MacBook Pro you need an Express Card 34 such as these;
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/expresscard+34esata
Then you can attach a drive to it. Take a look at the hard drives on the same site, they're quite good. They also sell enclosures you can insert a drive into so you could buy a hard drive from elsewhere, put it into an enclosure and then and then connect using esata - that will also work.
Best of luck.

External SATA recommendations

All,
Can anyone recommend an external SATA solution for my Powermac G5? I have a card with external ports, but I need advice on the following:
1. Decent enclosure that will allow spindown of disks
2. Cables
3. Disks
The other option would be for a NAS solution, but I don't believe that would be suitable for photography or video editing, but I guess it would be ok for archival storage ?
I'm preferably looking for gear available in the UK and known to work with the G5... Ever since finding out that a WD400GB disk was going to cost me an additional SATA controller, I've been a lot more cautious about this kind of thing

Wayne,
Your shopping in the same area i have been exploring recently. I'm looking for much more storage, possible with RAID AND backup options. I use Aperture extensively - as extensively as the hopeless and unapgradeable 6600 nVida video card allows. I also have a large itunes collection and do video creation on FC. I need more spindles!
I've settled on the Sonnet E4p PCIe card for my quad offering 4 external SATA ports, and it also support Port Multiplication (PM). PM is a means of clustering bunches of drives physically and connect them to one eSATA port. This particular card £200, supports up to x5 SATA drives per port, thus 20 external drives. However PM is slightly slower than direct connect to each drive. My view is that PM, possibly with RAID within it will be fast enough AND give me a backup option.
After the I/O card there is the choice of enclosure. I have done a lot of reading on what is out there and again i'm falling back to one of two Sonnet products, the 400A and 500P. The former offers x4 SATA drives and supports direct connect to each drive which would make a screaming I/O sub-system. However i also want lots of on-line data capability so speed is not the only priority. This moves me to the 500P enclosure, a x5 SATA PM-only setup. It allows sleep, drive temp monitoring and S.M.A.R.T. What i like about this is i can run a 2-3 drives of 4-500GB SATAII in a fast RAID leaving 3-2 drives for rolling (daily) and (weekly) backup processes as well as one left for x. All within one enclosure. And i still have three eSATA ports to expand on !
AMUG has some good detailed reviews of this and similar equipment:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/home_frame.html
I've not settled on software to run my backups yet, but the above represents my theoritical approach for on-line storage expansion of my Quad. What i am hesitant about is whether i will stick with my mac setup. No matter how much screaming about the lack of video upgrades from Apple, i've been totally hacked-off at the attitude of Apple towards me and others on this Aperture-critical issue. Its a long and very sad story that Apple should be ashamed of. Its 2 days short of 1 year since Apple launched the G5 quad and still they have done NOTHING grrrrrr...
PS One other useful benefit you get from the seperate SATA controller is you can choose and gain from SATA II drives. I'm looking at the WD RE2 drives, 400 or 500GB.
PPS I've been 'stalking' macheaven in the UK, they had the 500P on a ~12% discount, but missed it. Scan seems to have the best prices on drives.
Hope this helps, and appreciate the thoughts of actual eSATA users.

MAC PRO KONA 3 External SATA dropped frames

Recently our company upgraded to KONA3 card with the new MAC PRO. We were not aware our External SATA drives would not be 100% compaditable with the MAC PRO. The drives do mount and seem to work fine in Standard Def and compressed HD, but start to drop frames when dealing with Uncompress capturing. Spoke with AJA and was referred to use Fibre or SCSI based on the LH FAQ portion of their site.
We've installed a temp Fibre Channel Drives and set the card on port 4, with the KONA3 card on Port 3. Do note the drives are RAID 0.
Still having dropped frames when capturing Uncompress HD to the drives.
My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
2) Any ideas to contribute to my Fibre issues?
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank You All For Your Professional Experience
Marcus
MAC PRO 2.66 Dual Core Intel
2GB of RAM
3.2 TB of EXTERNAL SATA (from Promax)
500GB FIBRE CHANNLE
OS 10.4.8
KONA 3 Drivers vs3.3
FCP 5.1.2
MAC PRO Mac OS X (10.4.8) KONA3; External SATA

My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
The only Mac Pro compatible External SATA drive is from CalDigit. This has been proved by people in Barefeats and Creativecow. More and more people are using CalDigit S2VR HD and their FASTA-4e card to do the editing.
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
S2VR HD has been provedn to work and work very well with great price. Many people are raving about CalDigit's products and its support.
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862284
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862289
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862301
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=8&postid=917131
Power G5 Quad and Intel Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.3)

XServe G4 2.3 DP - external sata card?

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