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Reply 40 of 43, by zapbuzz

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I switced off IDE and RAID IDE controllers in my p3 system for my silicon 3112.
Although I did leave the secondary IDE port on just for dvd drive access changing the address in bios to be as far away from the SATA controller as possible.
Intergrated driverpacks into xp installer i set up windows xp from dvd and the only issue was slow decompression of driverpacks due to heavy compression.
The driverpacks have the best drivers i ignored the supplied driver disc for SIL3112.
I applied hot glue to the 4 SATA cables onto the controller as theres no lock tabs and vibration causes RAID stripes to break.
Running RAID 0 on 4 x 250gb Seagate disks is better than ribbon cabled mess putting stress on motherboard components in a small beige box.
There are faster 300mbit/s pci cards out there than silicon image i belive silicon image to be the budget generic grade.

Reply 41 of 43, by zapbuzz

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Kahenraz wrote on 2021-09-30, 20:32:
I'm experiencing corruption again on my SiI3112 after booting to an IDE drive running Windows ME and copying files to the SATA d […]
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I'm experiencing corruption again on my SiI3112 after booting to an IDE drive running Windows ME and copying files to the SATA drive. Drivers were not installed for the controller to test whether data corruption can be demonstrated in this configuration as it uses the BIOS to access the disk by falling back to real-mode instead of using its protected mode drivers.

The files I copied were InstallShield programs which I ran after the copy and each of them tested fine. I then shut down and tried booting to the SATA drive which also had an installation of Windows ME. The system blue screened with a Windows Protection Error. Subsequent reboots failed to let the operating systems boot and would just hang.

Plugging the IDE drive back in and booting to that yielded an unstable system. Running the InstallShield programs like I had before would cause the operating system to lock up. After a hard reset ScanDisk appeared and the system froze again.

I suspect that there are bugs with the real-mode (BIOS level) disk functions that are triggered by writing to the disk without having the controller drivers installed. This isn't a problem in NT because the drive can't be accessed this way in protected mode without any drivers installed. This is not the case in DOS, Windows 98, and ME, where the drive is accessible by BIOS functions by falling back to real-mode on disk access.
Due to power draw, I recommend a new psu to prevent power rail destabilisation, the old retro PSU? u gotta be kidding need a gaming psu like 400watt for SSD. I ran 4 x 500gb SSD on SIL 3112 but that system has 1000watt PSU. Didn't keep it on my p3 just didn't give my moneys worth than a win10 pc does.

I don't have enough data for protected mode drivers within an NT operating system but using this controller on any DOS or 9x system that might accidentally write to the disk does seem to risk corruption.

Without reading all threads:
you may find sharing issues between IDE and the SATA card, you might be able to change the addresses in your bios or try running without IDE support. I would recommend deftineately live without IDE switch off IDE and USB on pentium 2 system to unlock reserved bandwidth for SATA.
I found a way to run both IDE and SATA randomly changing access in system BIOS .... but I am pentium 3. After setting up 4 x 250gb SATA disks to a 1tb RAID0 stripe in SIL3112 card bios I set it to bootable and proceeded to boot xp over IDE installing fat32 large disk format tool IN XP, formatted the raid to 1tb fat32, shut down, disconnected xp disk booted up with dvd drive to setup 98se, after reboot prompt powered off and booted up on floppy to install r. loew large disk support (for above 120gb) then rebooted to continue setup without corruption. Before I installed the SATA driver by Silicon Image supplied with my pci card i installed R. Loew's SATA patch it seemed to work fine. But I then decided to suppliment it with the silicon image driver after and that worked too. I don't know if silicon image has support for the 1tb of space perhaps one day i'll use enough to see a bug.
Use of these SATA PCI cards on a pentium 2 may be degrading than SCSI simply because the limited bandwidth of the bus than pentium 3 and above can provide as well as PCI bus version.
USB reserves some bandwidth so turning them off on pentium 2 may give sliughtly better results on p2 chipsets.
Changing PCI card BIOS is only beneficial where the bios simply won't work. If it works I recommend stick with it. Otherwise it can become a riddellike should I use this for such and such file system oh dude in forum say blah blah blah (i own a few of these silicon image things all up $10 worth)

Reply 42 of 43, by Repo Man11

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I gave it one last try in my Epox 8KRA2+ (Socket A, running Windows XP). I installed it with the 1.3.10 driver, then rebooted and moved the SATA SSD to one of the card's ports. It wouldn't boot to Windows; I had to disable the IDE port 0. After that I had to boot into Safe Mode once then reboot, then things seemed to be normal. When I benchmarked it with ATTO, the performance was almost indistinguishable from the board's IDE port with a SATA adapter. Then I noticed that, though the desktop looked normal, in Device Manager it said there was no driver installed for the 6800 GS video card. I tried reinstalling the driver but no luck - there was some resource conflict with the Sil card. With no improvement in drive speed and a still unresolved hardware issue, the choice to remove it and go back to the onboard IDE was easy.

The way the Sil card mirrored the performance of the IDE port in having the read speed be about what you'd expect but a lower than expected write speed, makes me think there's something about the KT600 chipset that's to blame. This is the onboard IDE.

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