Am having some trouble when using this card with a Firmtek eSATA port multiplier. Whenever I start up after having been powered down, my drive in bay two does not mount on my Mac Pro desktop. It only mounts after I rescan twice with the Web Manager tool. It's a problem because I need all five available for RAID 5

Weird thing is I've experienced this same behavior with a PM from Sonnet too.

Have swapped out the drive, cable, changed PCI slots -- same results.

Firmtek Tech Support says that the RocketRAID driver does not work right on some Macs. HighPoint Tech Support says they've never heard of the problem. Anyone else experiencing this? Thought I'd check before I tear my hair out.

Also, anyone know of other SATA cards out there that will do RAID 5 with a port multiplier?

Did you create the array from scratch with Rocket Raid or is this a software (OS) raid set? An obvious question I know, but I had to ask....

Also do you have the latest firmware for all devices?

I think I got to the bottom of it -- these drives do not play nice with the RocketRAID 2314 drivers. Here's what Firmtek told me after further testing:

"I believe the issue you are having is related to the extended start time required by the Hitachi 1TB with the HighPoint driver. This issue can be duplicated on any PM enclosure with the RR2314 and Hitachi 1TB hard disks."

It's a big bummer because these Hitachi Ultrastars are the drives that Firmtek recommends, so I bought five of them. And now they are trouble with the RocketRAID 2314 which is the only card that does RAID 5 with port mulitpliers. FWIW, Firmtek says that Samsung Spinpoint drives and Seagate enterprise class drives do not cause this problem.

Brainburst - thanks for your replies. It was in fact a RAID 5 created through RocketRAID card's Web Manager. AFAIK you can't create any RAID 5 that's software-based.

funckdren:

And now they are trouble with the RocketRAID 2314 which is the only card that does RAID 5 with port mulitpliers.

I know next to nothing about RAID, but I've got a Rocket Raid 3522 driving a RAID 5 in an Enhance E8 MS enclosure with 8  Seagate 7200.11 1 Tb drives (MacPro Harpertown).  I've only done one short project on MC3 so far, and at least I can say the drives mount just fine.

Thanks for the info, 99. However, the Enhance E8 MS is not a port multipler. The Enhance E8 PM is their port mulitplier model.