sil3114 versus sil3114a

[Vladimir Konrad]

> I would highly recommend the HighPoint 18x0 series of controllers.  I 
> believe the 1810 is a 4-port, and the 1820 is an 8-port SATA card.  I just 
> installed an 1820 (just over $200 at NewEgg) on an old PII-400 dual cpu 
> machine, and it is insanely fast.  I have 4 320GB WD drives attached to it 
> in RAID5 config.

is the man page for the driver out of sync (5.4, 6-current) ?:

HARDWARE
     The hptmv driver supports the following ATA RAID controllers:

     ·	 HighPoint's RocketRAID 182x series

so it does suport 18x0 and 18x0A (that is my understanding from the
posts)? (it does according to highpoint but not according to the man
page)

i was not planning to buy hardware raid solution but the price is not
that bad (considering that i can plug it to the existing machine now and
having it running in a new motherboard later).

> The HPT card was detected by 5.4-RELEASE right out of the box, no 
> tinkering needed.  I installed the OS onto the RAID5 volume, and was up 
> and running in under an hour.

great.

> Did I mention it's insanely fast?  It's running in a standard PCI slot, 
> since my motherboard is old, and doesn't have any 64 bit PCI slots, but 
> the card is OK with that, it's backwards compatible to normal 32 bit slots 
> for folks like me.  IF you have a new motherboard with 64 bit slots, I can 
> only imagine how fast it would be with > 6 year old hardware.

well, the card is likely to move to and AMD64 bit machine i am planning
to buy in about a year.

> For the price, camparitively to a 3Ware card, I think it's one of the 
> absolute best value/performance cards I've seen out there so far.
> 
> -Gary

thank you all very much for responding, especially pointing to me that
the sil chip-sets are not that good. it would be great if the (S)ATA
maintainer summarised his opinions somewhere ;-).

vlad