RocketRAID 2720SGL

About:

A few weeks ago with the help of generous donations I was able to purchase RocketRAID 2720SGL SAS Raid Card. This card allows for the possibility to use raid for Mac OS X installs since it is natively supported. For users who need RAID arrays 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and 50 under Mac OS X this card is for you. At a price point of $155 it fits almost any users budget. I used Startech: SAS8087S450 cables which were $24 each.

The RocketRAID 2720SGL has two standardized SFF-8087 ports that are fully compatible with  3TB hard disks, and can support SAS and SATA devices in non -RAID JBOD’s, single disks, and RAID arrays 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and 50.

I installed my RocketRAID 2720SGL SAS Card in Slot-6 in my Asus Rampage IV Extreme. Then I connected my SAS cables to all of my SSD and HDD for Mac and Windows. I then booted my system and went into the SAS Cards BIOS and configured it as I needed it setting up a Raid 0 configuration for my Windows Programs Drive. Then I noticed that the card shipped with BIOS 1.0 which does not support SAS or SATA III. I used my DOS bootable USB drive to flash the card with the latest ROM which enabled SAS and SATA III on the card.

Once I performed a clean install I booted into Mac OS X 10.8 noticed a few issues. All of my drives attached to the SAS controller were showing up as external and there was no device information found under PCI devices in System Report. To fix this I did the following:

1. Open up IOreg and locate the card device and address:

2. Open up your current DSDT in your editor of choice and add the following code to the proper device found earlier:

Device (SAS0)
{
Name (_ADR, Zero)
Method (_DSM, 4, NotSerialized)
{
Store (Package (0x04)
{
“AAPL,slot-name”,
Buffer (0x07)
{
“Slot-6”
},
“name”,
Buffer (0x13)
{
“RocketRAID 2720SGL”
}
}, Local0)
DTGP (Arg0, Arg1, Arg2, Arg3, RefOf (Local0))
Return (Local0)
}
}

Note be sure to change the slot number to reflect were you installed it on your system

3. Install the DSDT and restart

4. The results:

External Drive Solution

1. Go to System/Libraries/Extensions and locate HighPointIOP.kext and HighPointRR.kext

2. Copy the two kexts to the desktop

3. Open both kexts and edit the Info.plist and change all references to External to Internal

4. Reinstall the kexts and restart

5. The results:

Benchmarks

1. SSD in Windows:

2. Raid0 in Windows: