Which Sata-controller card?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 11:08 AM +0100 11/22/04, Questions wrote:
>Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>>At 9:33 AM +0100 11/22/04, Stephan Fiebrandt wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>If you just need to expand your Mainboard with a SATA Controller,
>>>all you need is a poor card with a Silicon chip on it (Sil 3112 etc).
>>
>>
>>Unless something happened in the past week or so, you can still have
>>WRITE_DMA problems with the SiL 3112 if you connect a "fake SATA"
>>drive to it, such as some of the Western Digital drives.
>
>I've had in my test a Sil Image running on RELENG_5 cvs from last
>week with a Maxtor 160 SATA (sorry, don't have the model no handy
>atm) and it worked fine without any WRITE_DMA issues, cuz i was
>curious after a longer thread in freebsd-current mailinglist about
>WRITE_DMA problems.

It would be interesting to know if that's a real-SATA drive.  People
who use a real SATA drive from Seagate have reported that they do
not see any problems with the SiL 3112.  So, it is easy to blame
the hard drive.  On the other hand, I moved my problematic hard
drive from a SiL 3112 controller to a VIA 6420 SATA150 controller,
and I have seen zero problems even though I am using the exact
same hard drive.

>I also have to point out, that 5.3-R and RELENG_5 cvs are different
>  :)
>maybe something got commit into it last week, to be honest, i did
>not follow up the changes (shame, yes i know..).  Maybe my SATA
>disk is just not a "fake-SATA".

At least in my case, I had a lot of trouble completing a buildworld
due to the problems I saw.  If I cannot compile and install a snapshot
of RELENG_5, then it doesn't much matter what has been fixed!

>I agree that these "fake-SATA" and cheap Sil 3112 controller might
>not work proper together. But this looks like an hardware
>incompatibility issues than a driver malfunction.

I do not know where the real problem is, of course.  But I am
responding to the question that started this thread.  If *I* were
buying a SATA card right now, I would definitely avoid the SiL 3112.
I really do not care if it is only $10.  I suffered through at least
60 hours of headaches due to this SATA card combined with the
fake-SATA disk.  In my case it was particularly silly, because the
motherboard I bought already had SATA on it, but apparently the store
that built this for me did not realize that.  Once I really noticed
that the extra card was there, all I had to do was move the SATA
cable from the cheap SATA card to the motherboard, and immediately I
could do buildworlds with zero trouble.

Before I moved that cable, about eight out of ten buildworld attempts
failed, and two or three of those failed by panic-ing my machine.  This
cheap SATA controller really wasted a *lot* of my time, so there is no
way I could recommend it to anyone else.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu