SiI 3132 goes crazy and marks both disks as "Reserved" after each reboot

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Lev Serebryakov <lev at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hello, Freebsd-hardware.
>
>  I've added SiI 3132-based controller with two SATA disks to
> system, and almost lost my sanity: "gstripe" configuration
> becomes lost after each reboot. After some investigation,
> I found, that after each reboot last sector of disk contains
> SiI meta-information instead of GEOM:STRIPE one.
>
>  SiI RAID uitility shows disks as "Reserved disks," but refuse
> to delete RAID volume, as here is no one.
>
>  How to reset this state? And where SiI controller store
> information (additional to last sector)?

Dunno what-all else may be needed, but one way to preserve the SiI
metadata would be, instead of gstriping the disks themselves, make
a slice (MBR) or partition (GPT) on each disk -- a little smaller
than the whole disk -- and gstripe those slices or partitions.