Re: sil3112a SATA Controller, current status

At 7:53 PM +0100 11/18/04, Søren Schmidt wrote:
>Maseed wrote:
>
>[SNIP]
>>I have to point out in the above e-mail that the problem is not just
>>confined to the 36GB Raptor, which might be a PATA drive with a Marvel
>>chip to make it work with SATA drives, but it also plages *real*
>>native SATA drives as well, since the 74GB Western Digital Raptor I
>>have is a true SATA150 drive with TCQ.
>
>Correction, the 74GB Raptor is still not a pure or native SATA device,
>it still uses the marvell PATA-SATA converter chip. Its true that it
>supports TCQ but thats the same old way as the IBM deathstars used,
>and not directly comaprable to the new true SATA NCQ way of things.
>
>>Anyhow, I am wondering if this issue has been resolved yet or not,
>>either in FreeBSD-current or 5.3-RELEASE-px.
>
>If you want 24/7 uptime, you *really* should be bying hardware of
>a quality that matches that, the SiI3112 is *not* in that league,
>not even close.

I am trying to pin down problems "FAILURE - WRITE_DMA timed out"
in a new PC that I have.  I had some local shop build this for me,
and apparently there were "a few" miscommunications in what I
thought I asked for, and what they actually built.

The machine ended up with two SATA controllers:
    atapci0: <SiI 3112 SATA150 controller> -- on the motherboard
    atapci1: <VIA 6420 SATA150 controller> -- on a PCI card

The hard disk is connected to the PCI card.  Would that be more
reliable quality hardware than the SiI3112?

Also, the disk is a Western Digital WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0/02.05D02
120-gig drive.  I *thought* I was ordering a Seagate drive, but it is
quite likely that there was some confusion on that.  Would that Western
Digital SATA drive be a problem?  I do have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
hard drive that I could use (after shuffling a few things around).

-- 
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