Real World Experience with Seagate 2T drive?

eBay has a PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

 

The documentation says PCI-e X1, physically looks like a PCI-e x1 interface. Says it provides 4 lanes of SATA300 inc PM support.

So in theory you could have 20 HDDs but they would share one 250MB/s channel. However a couple of these cards and two PMs would give you 16 drives at reasonable cost and fairly good performance, especially if you have four or more onboard sata ports.   

 

Looks like a good card for those with PCI-e X1 slots to fill or as a replacement for a SIL3132 giving four sata ports as oppossed to two.

 

All my SATA parts report as UDMA100 under PCI (SIL3112, 3114 and 3124).

With my PCI SIL3124 I get lots of noise in the syslog when attaching HDDs via PM. Seem to work fine though. Marginal performance hit using PM when running parity.

 

I dont have any PCI-e motherboards for testing as yet. Will report back when they arrive.

 

Rgds

 

Kevin

 

Newegg  has this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

I think there has been a couple people try it in the unRAID server without success. Hopefully someone will get it to work.

I got mine yesterday.  It had an older RAID bios in it, so I flashed it to the newest standard bios.

However, it does not work in unRAID.  It initializes ok and sees drives in the bios, but when unRaid starts detecting and initializing the devices it stops and locks up at this card with IRQ errors, FF.  I don't recall the entire sequence and I haven't done further testing on it yet.  Since this is the first time a sil3124 has been built utilizing a PCI-e X1 slot, it could be a driver issue, but that's just a guess.

--Bill

eBay has a PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

 

The documentation says PCI-e X1, physically looks like a PCI-e x1 interface. Says it provides 4 lanes of SATA300 inc PM support.

So in theory you could have 20 HDDs but they would share one 250MB/s channel. However a couple of these cards and two PMs would give you 16 drives at reasonable cost and fairly good performance, especially if you have four or more onboard sata ports.   

 

Looks like a good card for those with PCI-e X1 slots to fill or as a replacement for a SIL3132 giving four sata ports as oppossed to two.

 

All my SATA parts report as UDMA100 under PCI (SIL3112, 3114 and 3124).

With my PCI SIL3124 I get lots of noise in the syslog when attaching HDDs via PM. Seem to work fine though. Marginal performance hit using PM when running parity.

 

I dont have any PCI-e motherboards for testing as yet. Will report back when they arrive.

 

Rgds

 

Kevin

 

Newegg  has this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

I think there has been a couple people try it in the unRAID server without success. Hopefully someone will get it to work.

 

I got mine yesterday.  It had an older RAID bios in it, so I flashed it to the newest standard bios.

 

However, it does not work in unRAID.  It initializes ok and sees drives in the bios, but when unRaid starts detecting and initializing the devices it stops and locks up at this card with IRQ errors, FF.  I don't recall the entire sequence and I haven't done further testing on it yet.  Since this is the first time a sil3124 has been built utilizing a PCI-e X1 slot, it could be a driver issue, but that's just a guess.

 

--Bill

 

Can you go into the bios of the card and disable the raid bios? I have to do this with my Adaptec 1430SA cards.

Please continue the discussion of this Bridged PCI-e SIL3124 board and it's use in unRAID here.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4091.msg39754#msg39754

It would be good to consolidate the discussion of this controller in one location so the history of it's use in unRAID is all in one place.