CentOS - Jun 2009 - External SATA enclosures: SiI3124 and CentOS 5?

Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an old
desktop
computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure with a controller
card based on the Sil3124. 
http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152

I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the company's
driver
page only lists drivers through RedHat 4. 
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3

Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it been for 
you? 

If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did you use 
and how did it work for you? 

Thanks, 

Ben 

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On Jun 1, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com>  
wrote:
> Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an
old
> desktop computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure  
> with a controller card based on the Sil3124.
> http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152
>
> I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the  
> company's driver page only lists drivers through RedHat 4.
> http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3
>
> Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it  
> been for you?
>
> If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did  
> you use and how did it work for you?
I use the Dell MD1000 enclosures with good results, but they only  
certify certain drives with their enclosures and they may have tweaked  
firmware, so open market drives will have variable results.

Their drive prices are good too if you have a quote generated they are  
20-30% off their web site's list price.

The real key is the controller though. Get one that can do hardware  
RAID1/10, 5/50, 6/60, if it can do both SATA and SAS even better and  
get a battery backed write-back cache, the bigger the better, 256MB  
good, 512MB better, 1GB best.

-Ross

Am 01.06.2009 um 23:57 schrieb Benjamin Smith:
> Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an
old
> desktop computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure  
> with a controller card based on the Sil3124.
> http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152
>
> I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the  
> company's driver page only lists drivers through RedHat 4.
> http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3
>
> Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it  
> been for you?
>
> If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did  
> you use and how did it work for you?
>
>



Promise VTRAK J series - but only with Solaris and on a LSI controller  
that gives you the SATA-drives as SAS-disks.
Very handy for ZFS - but the overall handling (no "this-is-the-bad- 
drive"-yellow/red light) leaves some room for improvement).

BTW: Apple sells these, too. So they should be around for a while...



Rainer
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Few days late responding to this. Sorry, just catching up on emails.

Benjamin Smith wrote:
> Tired of "little problems" trying to keep 7 drives working in an
old
> desktop computer, I'm considering an external SATA drive enclosure with
> a controller card based on the Sil3124.
> http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=152
Been there, done that. Upgraded to a Norco DS1220 12bay e-SATA unit for
my MythTV machine. Thinking of adding a second one.
> I'm a bit concerned about long-term support, namely that the
company's
> driver page only lists drivers through RedHat 4.
> http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=3
The sata_sil cards are pretty well supported by the sata_sil24 driver in
kernels >= 2.6.25, or earlier kernels with the libata patches applied.
> Does anybody else have experience with this controller? How has it been
> for you?
Not that controller, but pretty similar:

[darryl at server1 ~]$ /sbin/lspci | grep RAID
01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA
Raid II Controller (rev 01)
> If you have experience with an external SATA enclosure(s), what did you
> use and how did it work for you?
As mentioned, I have a Norco DS1220[1] which has only one 'strange'
thing about it. It has 12 bays. It is wired with 2 lots of 5 drives on a
port multiplier and the 11th and 12th drive as straight e-SATA with no
port multiplier for a total of 4 e-SATA ports. I thought it would have
made more sense to put 4 on 3 multipliers or 3 on 4 multipliers, but
anyway.

What I did with mine was to use one of those PC back panel brackets that
have a couple of eSATA ports and plug into the motherboard SATA
connectors and have my boot drives on those. That way the drives are
still in the enclosure but the motherboard sees them on the on-board ports.

Regards
Darryl

[1] http://www.norcotek.com/DS-1220.php