When selecting a driver for upgrade or installation, pick the latest released driver for your Silicon Image controller part number. Install the driver that is the same type as the BIOS you have installed for your controller.When replacing or updating the BIOS, pick the latest release of the BIOS that provides the desired functionality. For nonRAID applications and connection of removable media drives, use the IDE BIOS and drivers. Use the SATARAID or Medley RAID BIOS and drivers for RAID 0, 1 and 10. Use the SATARAID5 BIOS and drivers for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The SATARAID5 BIOS and drivers are replacing the SATARAID BIOS and drivers for the more advanced SATA controllers so they are the best choice for RAID with the Sil 3114, Sil 3124, and Sil 3132.When installing or upgrading drivers and BIOS, be sure to always use the same type of driver and BIOS. Use SATARAID drivers with SATARAID BIOS, SATARAID5 drivers with SATARAID5 BIOS, and Medley RAID drivers with Medley RAID BIOS.
- Silicon Image Raid Driver
- Silicon Image 3124 Drivers
Use IDE/nonRAID drivers with IDE/nonRAID BIOS. Mixing BIOS and driver types doesn't work. For best results, use the releases of BIOS and management tools recommended for the driver on the driver download page.You can usually identify the type of BIOS you have from the BIOS boot time messages. IDE BIOS will have a message with 'SATALink' during boot. SATARAID and SATARAID5 will have a 'SATARAID' message.
Enter the BIOS configuration menu by pressing F4 or CNTRL+S to determine whether you have SATARAID or SATARAID5 BIOS. Only SATARAID 5 BIOS has support for RAID 5. Medley RAID BIOS has a 'Medley RAID' boot time message.
Hi all, Does anyone have experience configuring the w/Silicon Image 3726 chip connected to a? The PM card I have is inside a 9-bay RAID tower, configured w/8 1Tb hard drives and 1 Pioneer Blu-ray drive. 4 HDs + the blu-ray drive are connected to the 5-port PM card, the other 4 HDs are connected via a SAS 4-port adapter.
The RAID tower itself will be connected to a PowerMac G5, via 2 4-port SI 3124 RAID cards. I know this is all PowerPC/PCI-X stuff and not Intel/PCI-e, but this forum seems to be the only one even discussing SI PM cards, so apologies in advance. The SATARaid5Manager software from Silicon Image sees the 4 HDs coming in via the SAS cable, but no HDs show up, or optical drive, show up from the 5-port card. I've installed both the Silicon Image SATARaid5Manager GUI and the Silicon Image Base driver for the 3124 cards. The Base driver software installs an executable in /usr/sbin and a script in /Library/StartupItems, but doesn't seem to have a GUI on the Mac, but from the documentation, it does seem to have a GUI on Windows platforms. Questions: 1) To get the PM card to recognize that an optical drive is connected to it, do I need to configure the PM card while running on a PC first, then finish the RAID configuration on my Mac? 2) Can I use eSATA to SAS SFF-8470 cable to connect the PM card in the RAID tower to one of my SiI3124 RAID cards?
Using only 1 of the 4 eSATA cables on the RAID tower side) All the SI documentation I've seen seems to indicate that the configuration is automatic, but the only explicit examples of BIOS settings seem to be for PCs, not Macs. I see plenty of RAID towers of different sizes that resellers have configured w/optical drives mixed in with hard drives using these SI PM + RAID card configurations like I have. Any tips or ideas on how one configures PM card to allow both optical drives and Hard drives to be connected, would be greatly appreciated.
Barefeats tests MacGurus RAID0 and RAID5 product solution:.Areca ARC-1221x RAID host adapter and the Burly 8-bay Video RAID. MacGurus has chosen the Areca brand as their preferred RAID host adapter to mate with their enclosure. They have worked closely with Areca engineering to fine tune the drivers. Though Apple actually ships Areca drivers with OS X, you want to use the ones that MacGurus includes in their bundle.
The ARC-1221x supports SATA HDDs various RAID modes (0, 1, 1E, 3, 5, 6 and JBOD). It was straightforward to install the driver/firmware and configure the RAID sets. The interface isn't elegant but fully functional - like a Humvee.
Real men don't need cute GUI. Does anyone have experience configuring the 5-port Port multiplier w/Silicon Image 3726 chip connected to a Silicon Image RAID 3124 controller card? Hi, You are putting together a bunch of parts that may or may not work together.
If all of the items came from a single reputable Mac vendor you could be assured that the firmware on the Sil-3124 and the 3726 PM boards were up to date and matched. Since that is not the case you may need to do the work yourself. This is what I would do. I would not use the SI R5 driver on the Mac. Even if you get it to work it can destroy the boot blocks on a Mac OS X boot disk that is connected to it. In addition, I find it is not reliable with Mac OS X. There is no uninstaller from SI for the R5 driver.
The best way to proceed troubleshooting this issue is with a spare disk with a fresh copy of Mac OS X on it. Boot from the fresh install for all of the testing provided below. Install the SiI-3124 BASE 2.0.3 driver. Verify that the SiI-3124 card has BASE BIOS installed. Verify that the 3726 units have firmware 1.0114 installed.
Requires a PC. Disconnect the DVD burner so that you can just test the HDs. Erase the disks in Disk Utility. Test the configuration. If everything works you can try adding the optical device. It may or may not work. Welcome to the hassle of not buying a system pre-configured to work on the Mac 🙂.
Barefeats tests MacGurus RAID0 and RAID5 product solution:.Areca ARC-1221x RAID host adapter and the Burly 8-bay Video RAID. MacGurus has chosen the Areca brand as their preferred RAID host adapter to mate with their enclosure. They have worked closely with Areca engineering to fine tune the drivers. Though Apple actually ships Areca drivers with OS X, you want to use the ones that MacGurus includes in their bundle. The ARC-1221x supports SATA HDDs various RAID modes (0, 1, 1E, 3, 5, 6 and JBOD). It was straightforward to install the driver/firmware and configure the RAID sets. The interface isn't elegant but fully functional - like a Humvee.
Silicon Image Raid Driver
Real men don't need cute GUI. Hi hatter, Thanks for the quick reply, very helpful links. I did see some time ago thread in this forum where the specific SI3124 RAID cards are mentioned as working on MacPros. I can confirm that the SI3124 RAID card also is recognized fine on PowerPC-based PM G5s.
From talking to techs at a couple of resellers, the only RAID chipset that will recognize optical drives and hard drives in a given RAID are ones based on the Silicon Image chipsets. My problem is in configuring the Silicon Image PM card to work together with the SI3124 RAID card. The SI docs are sparse in their discussion of the Mac software, most of their doc discussed Linux and Windows platforms. Hence my questions. Since I am using both SI-based RAID and PM cards, all the docs I've seen indicate these should work together fine.
Is an excellent comparison chart of different PM cards. Any idea if the eSATA to SFF8470 cable is causing any problems in allowing the PM card to be detected by the RAID card?
Does anyone have experience configuring the 5-port Port multiplier w/Silicon Image 3726 chip connected to a Silicon Image RAID 3124 controller card? Hi, You are putting together a bunch of parts that may or may not work together.
If all of the items came from a single reputable Mac vendor you could be assured that the firmware on the Sil-3124 and the 3726 PM boards were up to date and matched. Since that is not the case you may need to do the work yourself. This is what I would do. I would not use the SI R5 driver on the Mac. Even if you get it to work it can destroy the boot blocks on a Mac OS X boot disk that is connected to it.
In addition, I find it is not reliable with Mac OS X. There is no uninstaller from SI for the R5 driver. The best way to proceed troubleshooting this issue is with a spare disk with a fresh copy of Mac OS X on it. Boot from the fresh install for all of the testing provided below. Install the SiI-3124 BASE 2.0.3 driver.
Verify that the SiI-3124 card has BASE BIOS installed. Verify that the 3726 units have firmware 1.0114 installed. Requires a PC. Disconnect the DVD burner so that you can just test the HDs.
Erase the disks in Disk Utility. Test the configuration. If everything works you can try adding the optical device. It may or may not work. Welcome to the hassle of not buying a system pre-configured to work on the Mac 🙂.
Many thanks for the detailed answer. Your link to the 3726 firmware update and description of the PM card configuration cleared up a fuzzy area for me. I know there was a risk in getting these cards as components, instead of in a bundled system for the Mac. If I can't get it all to work in the PowerMac, I can configure one of my PCs to use the SiI RAID system. I like the challenge of getting all these components to work together. As a backup RAID system for the PM G5, I also have a RocketRAID 2220 card that configured the 8 HDs in the tower just fine.
The RR chipset doesn't support optical drives however, hence my testing of the SiI RAID + PM cards first. I'll report back the results, good or bad, after I've gone thru the steps you've provided. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
Silicon Image 3124 Drivers
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