Hello all,

In case it affects any of you, or perhaps purely for interest, here's a support question/answer I just asked/received personally:

Cheers,

Aaron

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Aaron M. Sivertson" amsivertson@gmail.com Date: November 15, 2007 1:32:58 PM CST (CA) To: "Aaron M. Sivertson" am_sivertson@umanitoba.ca Subject: Fwd: TSATAII-E342P and Leopard Reply-To: amsivertson@gmail.com

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Support support@sonnettech.com Date: 15 Nov 2007 13:22 Subject: Re: TSATAII-E342P and Leopard To: amsivertson@gmail.com

Aaron,

Actually it's an issue with the Oxford Semiconductor chip that Seagate is using in that drive to provide the multiple interfaces. As you can see, there is a problem on the SATA side of things. Western Digital has the same issue as does anyone using that OxSemi chip. That's the bad news.

The good news is that we've been working with OxSemi and Western Digital to resolve these issues. We first discovered the problem with some of our other controllers that are based on Marvell chipsets.

The Express34 card is based on a Silicon Image chipset and we've been passing information along to them as we get it. We're hoping they'll be releasing a new driver but we haven't been given an ETA. I'm going to get the website updated to mention that folks might have problems with those brands of drives under 10.5.

The problem is actually there in 10.4 but it doesn't cause issues. Apparently 10.5 enhances the problem.

Neal Sonnet Customer Service support@sonnettech.com

"No Switches. No Control Panels. Simply Fast."

On Nov 15, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Aaron M. Sivertson wrote:

...

Hi there,

Question for you - I'm running a MacBook Pro with Leopard, and using the above names Express Card - part # TSATAII-E342P

Prior to installing Leopard, everything was working fine with my Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750 GB drive running via e-SATA cable from that card. However, the first time I used it after installing Leopard, things started going wrong, so I'm wondering if there are any software driver fixes for known problems.

I was getting OS errors saying the drive couldn't be read properly. I cloned my Windows Vista installation (running through parallels) from it back over to my MacBook hard drive to back it up, and then attempted to use Disk Utility to completely zero out the Seagate drive, however that wouldn't work through the e-SATA connection. However, when I removed the e-SATA connection and hooked that drive up via USB, it worked fine (it just took 13 hours! :) ) Once formatted, I put the drive back into the Sonnet card, and have still been getting errors. Again, all was working fine under OS 10.4.

Perhaps there are some known issues with 10.5? I didn't see any specific updates on your site. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Cheers,

Aaron Sivertson

-- "Music is a fire in your soul that burns in your belly and comes out your mouth...so you'd better stick an instrument in front of it!" --"Bleeding Gums Murphy" from The Simpsons