RE: SiI3112 Controller Question

2006-03-30 Thread Richard P. Koett 
Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 1:51 PM -0800 3/30/06, Richard P. Koett wrote:
>> Some quick questions:
>> 
>> 1) Are these SiI3112 controllers any good?
> 
> They suck.
> They are horrible.
> They are very cheap to buy -- and are overpriced after
> you add in all the aggravation they provide.
> 
> Don't waste your time on them.  Buy a real SATA
> controller.  (disclaimer: I am only commenting on
> their SATA controllers)
> 
>> I have the option of using a HighPoint HPT372 instead
>> but was planning to use that elsewhere.
> 
> Unfortunately I don't know enough to comment on other
> alternatives.  I dumped my SiI3112 SATA controller
> and bought a real controller as made by Promise, but
> there are probably a number of other good options.

Well, the HPT controller is not what I'd call *real* RAID
either but it's lying around so I'll give it a try.

>> 2) Would upgrading to something newer than 5.4-RELEASE
>> help with this issue?
> 
> It will probably help.  That doesn't mean you will have
> a reliable controller, it just means that 6.x includes
> more work-arounds for the myriad bugs in these super-
> cheap controllers.  Some of these work-arounds result
> in performance penalties.
> 
> Just my opinion, of course...  YMMV.

Thanks. Your comments are appreciated.



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RE: SiI3112 Controller Question

2006-03-30 Thread Richard P. Koett 
Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
> Richard P. Koett wrote:
> 
>> 1) Are these SiI3112 controllers any good? I have the option of
>> using a HighPoint HPT372 instead but was planning to use that
>> elsewhere.  
>> 
>> 
> A simple google for "sil3112 freebsd" will return you plenty of
> responses which will provide an answer to your question - which is, no
> they are not any good.   I'll leave you with google to fill in the
> details. 
> 

Thanks Alex. I did check Google before posting but nothing I read was
very recent. I was curious if things had improved since newer firmware
and newer versions of FreeBSD had come along.

I'll go with the HPT controller.

RPK.

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SiI3112 Controller Question

2006-03-30 Thread Richard P. Koett 
Hello All:

I'm setting up a small fileserver at home running 5.4-RELEASE. I'm booting from 
a small IDE hard drive and have installed a SiI3112 controller and a pair of 
SATA drives for data storage. Before starting I flashed the controller with 
latest firmware (4.2.77) and performed a low-level format and burn-in test on 
both SATA drives (Maxtor 7L300S0's) using Maxtor's PowerMAX 4.22 diagnostic 
utilities. The burn-in tests ran two full passes (approx. 8 hours) on each 
drive without errors so I am reasonably sure the drives are working correctly.

I then did the following:

   atacontrol create RAID1 ad4 ad6
   bsdlabel -w /dev/ar0
   newfs -O2 -U -b32768 -f4096 -g8388608 -h16 -ospace /dev/ar0a

So far so good, but when I do this:

   mount /dev/ar0a /data

I get this:

   ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=24016

Some quick questions:

1) Are these SiI3112 controllers any good? I have the option of using a 
HighPoint HPT372 instead but was planning to use that elsewhere.

2) Would upgrading to something newer than 5.4-RELEASE help with this issue?

DMESG below...

TIA,
RPK.

Copyright (c) 1992-2005 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Sun May  8 10:21:06 UTC 2005
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (266.62-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x634  Stepping = 4
  
Features=0x80f9ff
real memory  = 268423168 (255 MB)
avail memory = 253018112 (241 MB)
npx0:  on motherboard
npx0: INT 16 interface
acpi0:  on motherboard
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
Timecounter "ACPI-safe" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0xfd08-0xfd0b on acpi0
cpu0:  on acpi0
pcib0:  port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0:  on pcib0
agp0:  mem 0xe000-0xefff at 
device 0.0 on pci0
pcib1:  at device 1.0 on pci0
pci1:  on pcib1
pci1:  at device 0.0 (no driver attached)
isab0:  at device 7.0 on pci0
isa0:  on isab0
atapci0:  port 
0xfff0-0x,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 7.1 on pci0
ata0: channel #0 on atapci0
ata1: channel #1 on atapci0
uhci0:  at device 7.2 on pci0
uhci0: 0x20 bytes of rid 0x20 res 4 failed.
uhci0: Could not map ports
device_attach: uhci0 attach returned 6
pci0:  at device 7.3 (no driver attached)
atapci1:  port 
0x74f0-0x74ff,0x74c4-0x74c7,0x74d8-0x74df,0x74c0-0x74c3,0x74d0-0x74d7 mem 
0xf5effe00-0xf5ef irq 15 at device 16.0 on pci0
ata2: channel #0 on atapci1
ata3: channel #1 on atapci1
xl0: <3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0x7c00-0x7c7f mem 
0xf5effd80-0xf5effdff irq 11 at device 18.0 on pci0
miibus0:  on xl0
ukphy0:  on miibus0
ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl0: Ethernet address: 00:01:03:c4:4e:56
atapci2:  port 
0x7800-0x78ff,0x74cc-0x74cf,0x74e8-0x74ef,0x74c8-0x74cb,0x74e0-0x74e7 irq 9 at 
device 20.0 on pci0
ata4: channel #0 on atapci2
ata5: channel #1 on atapci2
fdc0:  port 0x3f7,0x3f2-0x3f5 irq 6 drq 2 on acpi0
fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0
ppc0:  port 0x778-0x77f,0x378-0x37f irq 7 drq 3 on 
acpi0
ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/8 bytes threshold
ppbus0:  on ppc0
plip0:  on ppbus0
lpt0:  on ppbus0
lpt0: Interrupt-driven port
ppi0:  on ppbus0
atkbdc0:  port 0x64,0x60 irq 1 on acpi0
atkbd0:  irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
psm0:  irq 12 on atkbdc0
psm0: model MouseMan+, device ID 0
sio0: <16550A-compatible COM port> port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on acpi0
sio0: type 16550A
orm0:  at iomem 
0xcc800-0xccfff,0xc8000-0xcc7ff,0xc-0xc7fff on isa0
pmtimer0 on isa0
sc0:  at flags 0x100 on isa0
sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300>
sio1: configured irq 3 not in bitmap of probed irqs 0
sio1: port may not be enabled
vga0:  at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa-0xb on isa0
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 266615387 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 10.000 msec
ad0: 6149MB  [13328/15/63] at ata0-master UDMA33
ad4: 286188MB  [581463/16/63] at ata2-master SATA150
ad6: 286188MB  [581463/16/63] at ata3-master SATA150
ar0: 286186MB  [36483/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
 disk0 READY on ad4 at ata2-master
 disk1 READY on ad6 at ata3-master
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a

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