SAS Controllers w/ EFI for Mac OS X / OSx86 Solutions

[iTux]

What a controller PCI-E X1!!! SAS/SATA will work on MacOS from box????

[jokinawa]

I have tried the method fot getting the 3ware cards to work and I get a Kernel Panic every time with 5 different releases of OSX86. My Card (9500S) is even in the KEXT Info.plist but it still gives me kernel panic and I have no idea why. I noticed all the other cards work decent but after tring to find the best deals on them I realized none of them offer RAID 5 support. I found some decent prices on the LSI 8888ELP with RAID 5 and 6 support but no info on weather it is supported by OS X. Does anyone have any idea if it is or not?

[jokinawa]

Today I installed my Areca ARC-1220 8 Port SATA2 controller. I worked out of box with iDeneb v1.1 10.5.4 including JaS 10.5.4 Server files.

 

Will update later to tell if it is bootable.

 

UPDATE:

 

It does show up in the install process as an installable disk!!

 

Also some Xbenches on the Array:

 

8x500GB

 

Results 572.32

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.4 (9E17)

Physical RAM 2048 MB

Model MacPro3,1

Drive Type Areca ARC-1220-VOL#00

Disk Test 572.32

Sequential 350.86

Uncached Write 319.45 196.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 919.29 520.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 156.25 45.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 1278.30 642.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 1551.72

Uncached Write 653.45 69.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 1691.65 541.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 6152.44 43.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 3403.91 631.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

 

[vlad1966]

Has anyone any idea how to get 10.5.4 to recognize my LSI 3442E when it's set up as a RAID controller?

This is very frustrating. I'm able to get SATA drives that are attached to it to be recognized when the controller

is set up as JBOD, but when I enable RAID on the controller, Leo doesn't see them, although the card still shows

up under System Profiler.

 

PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP

[jkosharek]

Has anyone come up with a way to use the LSI 1068e (PCIe) as a bootable drive. Mine is not even seen in the OS.

[deleted_account]

Has anyone come up with a way to use the LSI 1068e (PCIe) as a bootable drive. Mine is not even seen in the OS.

1) Have you tired adding the bootloader to that particular drive you want to set as primary?

 

 

2) Did you make sure your BIOS detects your LSI 1068e? IF so, you should be able to set that particular drive as the drive to boot off of, once you set that drive with the bootloader. The drive won't display the OS until you made sure there is a bootloader, not just the OS, they both come hand in hand, you'll need it.

[jkosharek]

I have a LSI 1068e (PCIe) card with 4 300 GB 15k SAS drives, My System BIOS will let me boot and install Server 2008x64 or Vistax64. I have it set to my first bootable drive in the bios, and have copied a boot loader to it with EasyBCD telling it my osx 86 is on the 3 partition but the OSX installer doesn't see it I have a RAID built by the SAS BIOS or if they are 4 separate drives in pass-thru. For now I have a retail install running 10.5.5 on a 150 GB Raptor. Its just a pain to swap the boot drive in the bios when I want to change to the other os. BTW the OSX side installed to the onboard SATA never sees the LSI SAS drives. Anyone have any luck booting or even seeing their LSI card in OSX86?

[vlad1966]

I have the same problem with the LSI 1068E based 3442E-R. OS X will not see the RAID setup of this card. If you set the drives as JBOD, then they will be seen.

[jkosharek]

Mine shows up as "03:08.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS [1000:0054] (rev 01)" but is not seen at all by the OS X Install.

 

Would I have to edit a kext with my hardware ID to get it to show, and then maybe manually load that before the install?

[xhala_debru]

Hi,

 

I'm also looking to buy a sas controller for my Hack.

 

So far, I have come down to 3 choices (from cheapest to most expensive):

- HP part number 347786–B21, apprently it's LSI 1068 based (Raid 0 & 1)

- Highpoint 2640x4 (Raid 0 & 1 & 5...)

- Atto Xpress 308 (Raid 0 & 1 & 5...)

 

I'm 99% sure all of them would boot fine in NON raid mode.

But has anyone of you been able to have Leopard bootable in raid mode?

 

HP can be found in europe (belgium) around 120€

Highpoint around 150€

Atto around 320€

 

If none is rais bootable, I think the best choice out of 3 would e the Highpoint.

 

What do you think?

 

Thanx

[deleted_account]

Didn't reply to your PM because i guess you sent 2 that made my box full, just rather discuss here anywho.

 

 

 

Great Job on your findings, just to let you know, that Highpoint controller does not support SAS Hard Drives, though it may use mini-SAS implementation for multiple SATA Hard Drives. (For example, 4 SATA > 1 Mini SAS Adapter, SATA just does not have that capability...) Whatever purpose is, you never mentioned what you plan on using these controllers for.

 

 

 

My 308 is simply a Host Bus Adapater, not a RAID adapter, though I can use the Hardware RAID on my motherboard or software RAID via Disk Utility, in Leopard (which works).

 

The RAID version of this is R380, which will cost a little more, but has more Hardware RAID capabilities, regardless, you have to make sure within your OS X, you have your Controller card detected, you'll need to add scripts to the install via terminal.

 

 

 

I can't help you much with the LSI 1068, again, you'll need to implement LSI's fusion scripts, I'm not sure if this has yet been succesful, guess you can try

 

 

 

Though you provided 3 options of Controllers, I can't quite help you decide since I don't know what you're trying to do, other than deciding on 3  Controllers. Provide more details, like what you plan on using them for, whats your setup you're trying to configure? Types of Hard Drives? SAS or SATA, etc...Booting? or just Backup.

 

 

 

Good Luck

[vlad1966]

gramarye,

 

According to Highpoint, the 2640x4 is both a SAS & SATA controller:

 

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr2640x4.htm

 

I'm considering getting this one for use with 4 73GB Fujitsu 15k SAS drives

I bought recently if I can't get my LSI controller to boot in RAID mode.

[jkosharek]

I scrapped my LSI card for a Areca ARC-1222 PCIe x8 SAS RAID. My 4x 74GB 15k RAID 0 seen by OS X as a single disk!

[vlad1966]

I scrapped my LSI card for a Areca ARC-1222 PCIe x8 SAS RAID. My 4x 74GB 15k RAID 0 seen by OS X as a single disk!

 

Thanks for the info - it's an expensive card. Do you have performance numbers?

 

PS: did you have to do any voodoo hacking or did the ARC-1222 automatically find the HDDs in RAID mode? So the ARC-1222 is bootable on a hack?

[deleted_account]

For the Highpoint, unless it's new, I won't look into details, than there are SAS controllers out in the market now. Highpoint was explicitly SATA-only just a few months ago, glad they finally developed some Enterprise products.

 

For the Areca, I believe their SAS controllers are bootable, since they have EFI compatabilities. I can recall only Areca and the Apple Pro RAID card were the only mentioned bootable OS X Leopard cards.

 

Regarding the rest of the Controllers mentioned, remember, having OSx86 has an advantage of having the BIOS before the Emulation starts. If your card can be detected in the BIOS, and your computer can boot off of the RAID configuration, for all I know, OSx86 should be able to boot off the drive, with of course, the implementation of the respected card's script lines, can be managed via terminal. Since you need the bootloader in your booting drive anyway, that bootloader should work on any drive, even RAIDed drives as long as its deteced in BIOS and OS X can read it.

[xhala_debru]

Didn't reply to your PM because i guess you sent 2 that made my box full, just rather discuss here anywho.

Great Job on your findings, just to let you know, that Highpoint controller does not support SAS Hard Drives, though it may use mini-SAS implementation for multiple SATA Hard Drives. (For example, 4 SATA > 1 Mini SAS Adapter, SATA just does not have that capability...) Whatever purpose is, you never mentioned what you plan on using these controllers for.

My 308 is simply a Host Bus Adapater, not a RAID adapter, though I can use the Hardware RAID on my motherboard or software RAID via Disk Utility, in Leopard (which works).

 

The RAID version of this is R380, which will cost a little more, but has more Hardware RAID capabilities, regardless, you have to make sure within your OS X, you have your Controller card detected, you'll need to add scripts to the install via terminal.

I can't help you much with the LSI 1068, again, you'll need to implement LSI's fusion scripts, I'm not sure if this has yet been succesful, guess you can try

Though you provided 3 options of Controllers, I can't quite help you decide since I don't know what you're trying to do, other than deciding on 3  Controllers. Provide more details, like what you plan on using them for, whats your setup you're trying to configure? Types of Hard Drives? SAS or SATA, etc...Booting? or just Backup.

Good Luck

Sorry, didn't mean to send it twice, it's just that it didn't appear in my sent messages, so I thought i didn't send it and clicked again on send message.

I just wanted to reactivate the thread in case you didn't check it

But thank you for your reply and pointing me out that the Atto 308 was "only" a bus adapter.

 

In my case, I just want to fulfill the geek inside of me and try 15k rpm sas drives.

The better would be it being bootable (system drive) and if it doesn't cost too much, raid bootable.

 

I haven't found a reseller for an areca in belgium yet, I have to check it.

 

And thanks for all the others who posted, I'll keep you informed in this post of my successes or failures...

[deleted_account]

Sorry, didn't mean to send it twice, it's just that it didn't appear in my sent messages, so I thought i didn't send it and clicked again on send message.

I just wanted to reactivate the thread in case you didn't check it

But thank you for your reply and pointing me out that the Atto 308 was "only" a bus adapter.

 

In my case, I just want to fulfill the geek inside of me and try 15k rpm sas drives.

The better would be it being bootable (system drive) and if it doesn't cost too much, raid bootable.

 

I haven't found a reseller for an areca in belgium yet, I have to check it.

 

And thanks for all the others who posted, I'll keep you informed in this post of my successes or failures...

 

Great! Hope things work out as SAS can be costly, are the 500gb 15K SAS drives out yet? For the ATTO, the "H" in H308 stands for "Host-Bus Adapter," the "R" in R380 stands for "RAID." What I'm really confused about is that I seem to be able to RAID with my HBA, but it's probably all software anyway. Remember, there is an advantage of using OSx86, is that there is a BIOS, which mean the computer does detect your hardware and all the drives prior to booting Leopard, now the next step is to actually have Leopard to read those drives in RAID (the very reason why we chose only Mac compatible Controllers! which comes with the drivers for the card)

 

 

 

 

My only situation right now, planning my Mac Pro setup (no more OSx86), seems liek the only bootable controller cards are the Areca (not quite sure about the one mentioned above) and the Apple Pro RAID Card as well. I think I'd rather just get the Pro (though it costs so much, i don't want to go through any workarounds anymore).

 

 

 

Good luck everyone, let me know if there are any more questions, I'll do my best to help, stay optimistic about this topic!

[xhala_debru]

Hi,

 

I finally got an areca 1222 SAS card.

I was afraid buy a cheaper one but that would maybe not be bootable.

 

So I can confirm that the card is raid bootable.

For my installation, what i did was:

1) Create the raidset (0) in bios

2) Boot on my "old" sata installation

3) Install the areca application (no need to install the drivers, they are in Leopard)

4) Format the raidset volume in GUID, 1 partition

5) Clone my install on raidset volume using Superduper (great soft, think about buying it...)

6) Install Chameleon bootloader on the raidset volume

 

I don't know why, but at first boot I had a "didn't receive an Hpet" error message, so I rebooted on my old install, recloned with superduper, and rebboted with -f options and then it was OK

 

Only trouble I have, as I have several disks connected on my areca controller, the bios of the motherboard seems to change the Hdd boot order, wich is a bit annoying.

[vlad1966]

xhala_debru, Are you able to install OS X to the Areca RAID 0 by booting a distro like Leo4all or any other?

I'd like to know if I could avoid cloning over a current install & copying Chameleon.

 

Hi,

 

I finally got an areca 1222 SAS card.

I was afraid buy a cheaper one but that would maybe not be bootable.

 

So I can confirm that the card is raid bootable.

For my installation, what i did was:

1) Create the raidset (0) in bios

2) Boot on my "old" sata installation

3) Install the areca application (no need to install the drivers, they are in Leopard)

4) Format the raidset volume in GUID, 1 partition

5) Clone my install on raidset volume using Superduper (great soft, think about buying it...)

6) Install Chameleon bootloader on the raidset volume

 

I don't know why, but at first boot I had a "didn't receive an Hpet" error message, so I rebooted on my old install, recloned with superduper, and rebboted with -f options and then it was OK

 

Only trouble I have, as I have several disks connected on my areca controller, the bios of the motherboard seems to change the Hdd boot order, wich is a bit annoying.

[xhala_debru]

xhala_debru, Are you able to install OS X to the Areca RAID 0 by booting a distro like Leo4all or any other?

I'd like to know if I could avoid cloning over a current install & copying Chameleon.

Hi Vlad,

 

I'll check that this evening when I'll get back from work.

And for my messed boot drive order, I seem to have fixed it by allowing some time to spin up the drives at boot time by the controller.

 

Another problem is that on my setup, sleep function doesn't work anymore, fans keep spinning.

But sleep also breaks Time Machine (backup volume could not be found) and Superduper (Failed to preserve spotlight state).

I don't know which files got messed up.

 

And, of course, boot time and shutdown time is increased (by approx. 20 sec.)

 

But system is blazing fast!

[xhala_debru]

xhala_debru, Are you able to install OS X to the Areca RAID 0 by booting a distro like Leo4all or any other?

I'd like to know if I could avoid cloning over a current install & copying Chameleon.

Yes, it does appear as an installable disk (tried with jas 10.5.4) and I can see the drivers are loaded at startup

[vlad1966]

Yes, it does appear as an installable disk (tried with jas 10.5.4) and I can see the drivers are loaded at startup

 

Thanks xhala_debru,

 

I thought this would be the case, just wanted to be certain before blowing $500 on the ARC-1222.

[ilkarro]

Nobody tried one of Supermicro AOCs? They are cheap but we don't know if they are really bootable

[Tommy]

Do we still have any luck with SAS3442E ?

[bouloi75]

Hi,

 

I'm also looking to buy a sas controller for my Hack.

 

So far, I have come down to 3 choices (from cheapest to most expensive):

- HP part number 347786–B21, apprently it's LSI 1068 based (Raid 0 & 1)

- Highpoint 2640x4 (Raid 0 & 1 & 5...)

- Atto Xpress 308 (Raid 0 & 1 & 5...)

 

I'm 99% sure all of them would boot fine in NON raid mode.

But has anyone of you been able to have Leopard bootable in raid mode?

 

HP can be found in europe (belgium) around 120€

Highpoint around 150€

Atto around 320€

 

If none is rais bootable, I think the best choice out of 3 would e the Highpoint.

 

What do you think?

 

Thanx

 

I have the Highpoint 2640x4 and SAS drives. It works and is bootable in RAID mode. However, it's not visible during "normal" installation (with Install DVD). I installed first Leopard on a SATA drive, then from there install the Highpoint kext and lauch Leopard install process (retail Leopard Install DVD) and choosed my SAS drive as destination.

The only problem I have is when my hack goes into sleep mode and then wake up, then the system freeze (I think the SAS drive/controller are not initialized).

Would someone have an idea about sleep mode when using HBA and SAS drive is welcome :-)