Re: Sil3112 SATARaid PCI Controller Card

[Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 duke edu>]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 at 10:24am, Daniel Henninger wrote

> Hi folk!
>
> I suspect I am kind of doomed here, so I'm trying to see if anyone has any 
> suggestions.  I have a Silicon Image 3112 SATARaid PCI controller card.  (or 
> at least that's what it announces itself as and I vaguely recall that being 
> the name that was on it when I bought it.. was a while ago.. it's non-trivial 
> for me to just shut my machine down and look)  I have a Seagate SATA drive 
> connected to it.  I don't actually use the raid functionality of the card, 
> just basically use it as a means to connecting an SATA drive to my machine.
>
> So I've been using this under RHEL3 for quite some time now and have had no 
> problems.  I tried to upgrade to RHEL4 over the weekend and my drive was not 
> recognized.  In the boot output I'd swear I can see it being recognized, but 
> then it sees no drive what-so-ever.  (drive comes up as hde)  After some 
> chatting on ##linux and various attempts to get it happy, I ended up giving 
> up for now and stayed with RHEL3.

Just as a data point, I had a similar card (I don't remember the exact 
model), and never got it to work in RHEL4.  The first system I tried it in 
was an x86_64 system with 8GB.  It recognized the card, but the install 
would always die with FS errors.  I chalked it up to the card not handling 
big memory or x86_64 correctly.  When I had the exact same problems with 
the card in a <4GB memory x86_64 system and an i386 system, I chucked it.

I may well have had a bad card, but it didn't give me confidence in add-in 
SATA controller cards.  When I need one, I hate to say it, I just use a 2 
port 3ware 8006 card.  They're not cheap (relatively speaking), but 
they're *solid*.

--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University