Has anybody gotten a RocketRAID 640 working in a Mac Pro?
I have a RocketRAID 640 I purchased, based on the fact that it "had OS X drivers". Unfortunately l'm running into a bit of a snafu here.
The English website (www.highpoint-tech.com) shows for the RR640 drivers that "Mac drivers are available at http://hptmac.com/cn". This is their Chinese website of all places (why, if it has Mac drivers are they not listed on the English site?). I recently was contacted by their tech support, and they appear to be totally clueless why their driver isn't working.
Ya see, the one they link to is this one:
http://www.hptmac.com/US/productfiles/HPT-Quad-eSATA-mac-v100-100120.dmg
But it's on the Chinese website. Yay?
So here's the issue: The .kext file's info.plist shows an IOPCIPrimaryMatch entry of "6441103". Breaking that down, the 1103 is the Marvell 9128 SATA controller (there are two on the card, oddly at x1 link width). The 644 is the ID of the card the driver is looking for in order to load. In other words, the driver (RR64x.kext), from the installer packaged labeled "RR644M" (for RocketRAID 644 Mac), will only see the RR644, but not the RR640 which I have. Unfortunately, injecting the proper IOPCIPrimaryMatch entry into the .kext file renders the .kext useless as it becomes a file that has "been installed incorrectly and cannot be used", because a user (me) modified it.
Has anybody gotten this card to work in a Mac Pro in OS X (it works fine in Windows on a Mac Pro) other than the inability to use CTRL-H to activate its BIOS configuration utility at bootup)? And if so, what driver are you using?
I've lost three days worth of work/"fun time" to trying to figure this out. I don't know why the card is so hard to get working, since functionally it's identical to the 644, only instead of eSATA ports they're all internal. Even the controllers used are the same, as is the link width of the card itself (but apparently not the firmware?).
I knew HighPoint had ridiculously bad support, but their hardware in general is rock solid (once you get it up and running). I kind of want my Vertex 3s to finally run speedy. I'd really hate to have to get a 6Gbps SAS card instead (and it'd have to be bootable which is EXPENSIVE) in order to plug into my Mac Pro 1,1's SAS cable that it uses to control the four internal HD bays (though that would give the HD bays native 6Gbps speed!).
Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Dual Core Xeons (Mac Pro1,1), Mac OS X (10.6.8), Mac OS X Lion on secondary boot SSD