[XCSSA] I hate Silicon Image...

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

On Jun 12, 2009, at 9:53 AM, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio  
wrote:

> X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio wrote:
>> On Jun 12, 2009, at 7:44 AM, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio
>> wrote:
>>
>>> X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio wrote:
> snippy snip
>>> I had a motherboard with that sata chipset that was from 2003 I  
>>> think.
>>> Yes it was not very good.  I think the 3112 was the first chipset  
>>> that
>>> silimage ever made for sata.
>>
>> Yeah that sounds about right. Both my SATA cards are from 2004
>> (including the MegaRAID). I had tried using my non-RAID card and it
>> doesn't even recognize the 1TB drives. When I tried using the card
>> with FreeBSD, it would just kernel panic, so I'm pretty sure it's a
>> very terrible chipset. Supposedly the newer chipsets (3124+) are much
>> better.
>>
>> From looking online, it looks like the performance issues are in part
>> due to the driver issues inherent in the card, but also an ugly
>> compatibility hack with Seagate drives which basically nukes
>> performance. I think there's a work-around, but it's all for kernels
>> much older than the one that ships with Ubuntu. I might try a newer
>> kernel, but I used Ubuntu so I didn't have to end up doing that all
>> the time (though I don't mind doing it so much).
>>
>> Oh well. I've only got about 80 more hours until the RAID has  
>> finished
>> rebuilding :P
>
>
> FWIW, even though I know it's old and was cheap, the 3112 is still a
> solid performer on a ST3320620AS - 60MB/sec easy. This is, however,
> under NetBSD. I haven't tried it under Linux; the Linux box is using  
> the
> onboard nforce junk.
>
> I haven't tried the 3112 with anything larger thana 750GB, mind you.
> Holding off on upgrading anything in this machine until I can put a  
> real
> RAID in it ;)

Meh, the "real" RAID controller performance was better, but not as  
high as I wanted (though I didn't try very hard to optimize it). It's  
pretty old though (MegaRAID 150-6) - newer cards probably work a lot  
better. I would say for a dedicated server, such as DB server, a  
hardware RAID makes a lot of sense. As would it on a gaming rig, I  
suppose. Software RAID is pretty hot in Linux though. Of course it's  
only as good as the drivers that control the hardware :)

This is the first time I've had significant issues with the 3112 since  
the FreeBSD fiasco (which was like 2 years ago). However, I have since  
changes OSes (to Ubuntu from Gentoo) so that could be part of it. Like  
I said, I did read some Seagates had issues, although my old Seagates  
didn't have any problems. However, I was running those on the hardware  
RAID controller.