Atto h680 with esata breakout not reading dock

[John Saunders]

I am having an issue with compatibility for my thermaltake blacx esata dock and our Atto h680 HBA with highpoint esata breakout cable.

The drives mount sporadically with incomplete folder lists, lack of read/write capabilities and a myriad of errors when copying data. I reinstalled and hooked the dock back to our pcie esata card and the same dock and drives work flawlessly.
Our gtech GspeedQ(raid5) and graid(raid1) both work with no issues, so i am semi inclined to believe it is an issue with a straight esata passthrough (the others have controllers built in) or the thermaltake docks (i have tried 2 different models and unfortunately the two other brands i could find that sell similar docks appear to be rebranding the same hardware).

System Specs:


Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro4,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per processor): 8 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 5.86 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP41.0081.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.39f5
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f5

I called atto and as others have stated they maintain their stance of "no support for esata connection".

I couldn't find any posts of anyone having issues that had been resolved or found workarounds. Has anyone else hooked up an esata internal hard drive dock via breakout cable to the atto and had issues? Or has anyone else has succesfully set up an esata dock with breakouts and what brand if so.

Thanks for your help, if i've left out info that could be helpful to diagnosis let me know.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Bad cable?
Your other devices that work just fine, do they work fine on all 4 connectors of the breakout cable?

Are your firmware and drivers up to date?

You may need to load an EFI editor and go into the EFI settings for the card and tell it to reset everything to default. I found that has fixed some incompatibilities that other people were having with a few devices, namely inability to use their RED SSD readers. EFI instructions are on the ATTO site. Make sure you update firmware to the latest (last september) before doing the EFI thing.

If the EFI is clear and as it should be, you should be able to option-boot your Mac and boot from a device on your ATTO card.

You may have an issue with drivers too. Not much you can fix there unless you do a clean install of everything.

I love the ATTO cards and they're still my go-to cards for eSATA/SAS. But have to say that their "support" kinda pisses me off when it comes to their stance on eSATA. They clearly market the cards for eSATA use and really drive this point home at events like NAB and whatnot. But when you call their support people about a problem, you get the "it's not an eSATA card". WTF?

[Cody Cuellar]

Hate to dig up such an old post, but I'm having very similar issues and can't find much other info out there. I have the H680 and have been using a fanout cable for over a year now with no issues whatsoever. Production didn't wan't to buy any expensive externals so I offered to go the bare drive route and get some enclosures with esata ports. First they picked up the Vantec Nexstar3 enclosures which where easy to install and put together but were very random when they decided to connect. Sometimes I'd have to reboot a few times, and power them on and off multiple times until randomly they'd pop up on the desktop or show in disk utility. I then switched to sabrent enclosures which I'll never buy again, but they won't even mount now via the fanout cable. The drives are Seagate 3TB Barracudas. The strange thing I've found is that it's not the drives, cable (although I just ordered two more highpoint fanout cables) or the cases. Here's the results of a bunch of different tests:

The drives mount internally with absolutely no problem and work flawlessly as expected.
The drives in either enclosure hooked up via USB or eSATA through my Sonnet eSATA card work perfectly fine every time.
The fanout cable works (all 4 connectors) perfectly fine every time with my Red Station and 3TB G-Drives.

My guess is it has something to do with the controllers built into the enclosures that's giving the H680 a hard time communicating with the drive? Maybe I should just keep trying different enclosures until I find reliable ones? But it's strange that the only thing having issues is either of the enclosures I've tried through the Atto, yet they all work through the Sonnet H680.

Jeff when you say EFI editor, are you referring the the Atto Config tool, and resetting everything to default there? I've tried installing the latest drivers, and downloaded the latest firmware, but don't want to mess with flashing it until the job is done. It's interesting that John was having the same issues with a dock, it seems like the controllers in the DIY enclosures aren't built the same as the pre-made ones like G-Drives... I've done a bit of Googling and can't find much else other than this thread so anyone else that has experienced this and either found a fix or a reliable enclosure is welcome to chime in! Thanks!