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Macbook Pro doesnt recognize external harddrive using esata

I have the first generation macbook pro with 10.4.10.... I have a western digital My Book 500gig with usb and esata. I am also using a esata controller, the controler is Merax eSATA Xpress.

My issue. I installed the drivers for the controller and then the controller inself and it shows the controler in the top doc. But when connecting the hard drive to the controller my mac doesnt recognize it. If i use USB it is recognized. I have done many restarts and shut everything down, started up the mac and then the hard drive and nothing, also done it where the hdd is started before the mac and still nothing. I need some help. Called all 3 manufactures and everyone just says its not there products fault.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jul 30, 2007 11:02 AM

17 replies

Jan 19, 2008 1:49 PM in response to firemansteve

Same problem here with the SATA2-EC3401 card and a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500 GB ... SI drivers are far beyond dated out ... they are starting to dust deeply digged in the Silicon Image driver-server. This company just *****. The even worse part is, that their chipset is built in to almost any available eSATA / ExpressCard34 controler in existence ... i have emailed them twice without any response at all. They are not even capable of putting up a simple note telling that "a 10.5 (Leopard) driver is still beeing tested" or something similar.
This is definately the worst support a company can offer. I would even go so far, that they aren't "qualifying 10.5 at the moment", it is out for 85 days now, sold about 4,000,000 times, recieved it's first major update and they are STILL not able to deliever a useful and functional driver, come on, you are not really believing this, aren't ya?

So we are now all sitting here with potentially super fast eSATA HDs and our extra-neat Leopard-machine with Time Machine, iTunes Libraries above the 50gb-mark and tons of stuff and still are forced to use USB 2.0 because some jerks at Silicon Image are not able to bring 335,829 bytes (332 kb) of code to work on the latest Mac OS X ... yay! (The quoted *.kext is located in your /Library/Extensions/ folder. I am no professional programmer, but 332 kb of code can't take 2 months to update, can it?

At the moment, I am not aware of any satisfying workaround for this problem. Either it is pure luck or limited to specific HDs or eSATA controlers. If you have any solutions, be so kind to let us all participate, if you haven't blame Silicon Image!

Mar 3, 2008 4:25 PM in response to Kamikaze28

I just bought the PNY ExpressCard... I just installed the 1.1.9 drivers off the CD, plugged up the card... then plugged up the cable.

Everything works flawlessly and it shows as connected via PCI bus and mounts the drive with a SCSI interface. Really impressed. Really fast.

OS X 10.5.2 - MBP 1,1 - 1.1.9 Silicon Image drivers - PNY ExpressCard - Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB

Macbook Pro doesnt recognize external harddrive using esata