PCI-X SATA Card + Server Recommendation

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 03:17:36PM +0100, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> [ re-visiting this thread ]
> 
> On Sunday 26 October 2008, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> > > Stay away from this card.
> 
> Jeremy, any specific reasons for that? Yes, it's a low-end piece of crap 
> consumer electronics, but as a straightforward 4-port SATA card it seems to 
> do well enough. It's just part of ata(4) and one of the ones I've got has 
> been up for 395 days driving striped mirrored GEOMs under reasonable (but 
> certainly not high) load.

A large number of problems people report to the FreeBSD lists involve
Silicon Image controllers.  There are confirmed problems within certain
models of their SATA controllers which cause silent data corruption and
other issues, affecting Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows.  See "Product
Alerts" below, then try Googling "silicon image corruption".  I'm not
talking out of my ass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Image

If you have one that works, "good for you".  :-)  But based on the
above, I **will NOT** recommend these controllers.  I'm not even willing
to trust later revisions like the 3124; not catching data corruption
during QA/testing is simply unacceptable regardless of what "class" of
product it is.  I would be very surprised to hear someone advocate use
of Silicon Image controllers after reading the above.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |