Rosewill RC-605 problems

I got this Rosewill eSATA so I could plug fast drives into my MacBook Pro. Well, like lots of third party stuff it doesn’t really work. It is faster though, but you can only plug one drive in. At least for me. There are lots of issues with the driver apparently as Silicon Image is a low cost provider and they are not focused on the Mac market. Sigh, so I guess back to USB 2.0 you go…See below

SATA, eSATA and Seagate Drive problems – Topic Powered by eve community

From Firmtek support:
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– Both Seagate FreeAgent and WD My Book are essentially same drives from SATA interface point of view. While internally each company is using own mechanism, the SATA electronics communicating with the outside world appears to be made by the same manufacturer both Seagate and WDC did contract to do the external box design. It does not appear to be Seagate or WDC.

– The SATA interface of both VIOLATES the SATA protocol, not supporting certain mandatory commands.

– There is a further issue, which prevents the said drives work properly with ANY of SATA controller we are aware of on the Mac. There is an exception: any SiliconImage 3132 or 3124-based controller (ours is based on SiliconImage 3132) will work: as long as the driver of Silicon Image (manufaturer of the chipset) is used instead of any other driver. That driver has some shortcomings:

– it emulates SCSI over SATA instead of using Apple’s
SATA API-s
– it does not support S.M.A.R.T.
– it does not have bootability provision

Apple – Support – Discussions – Macbook Pro doesnt recognize external …

So far I have only been able to get it to mount as an eSata drive via the ExpressCard if I have the card plugged into the laptop and the drive fully connected to the card and laptop (USB power and eSata connection to the card), when the system boots up.

Other than that, it mostly shows up under /Volumes with intermittent amount of data inside (sometimes the root directories, other times nothing).

I’ve also gotten a good number of kernel panics with the stack trace indicating the Sil3132 1.1.9 driver as a cause.

Apple – Support – Discussions – Macbook Pro doesnt recognize external …