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sil3114 sata card



 
 
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  #11  
Old July 3rd 19, 01:19 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Tue, 02 Jul 2019 11:45:17 -0400, Flasherly wrote:

But you can buy another one now, if you want. And it may as well be a
SIL: for the money you may not find better in another brand. (Under
$10 on Ebay


I see plenty of PCIe, but not much standard PCI. The next best offer is
$15 for the same card.

I don't want another from the same seller, maybe they have a bad batch.


  #12  
Old July 3rd 19, 02:03 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Tue, 02 Jul 2019 21:15:27 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

The flasher program claims to support the chip but something went wrong.
Just enough to erase the chip it seems. If you don't connect all the
chip pins to the right wires it's not going to work.


Here's another thread where people had problems flashing:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=47717



  #13  
Old July 3rd 19, 02:37 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Tue, 02 Jul 2019 20:03:54 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

Maybe I trashed the card when I hot plugged it trying to get it booting
after the bad flash.


The card has a jumper jp4. I didn't what it was for, so I tried it. This
was before desoldering the BIOS chip. It didn't help.

But now I think those two pins are for a HDD LED. Shorting it to ground
was probably a bad idea. Maybe that damaged the card.


  #14  
Old July 3rd 19, 02:56 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 01:37:48 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

But now I think those two pins are for a HDD LED. Shorting it to ground
was probably a bad idea. Maybe that damaged the card.


This board has a boat load of surface mount capacitors.

There's probably just one bad component somewhere. Desoldering and
checking them all would take too much time. More than $9.49 worth.

Hey! I found a broken solder joint on one side of C41. Tomorrow I'll
repair it, and see if that helps.



  #15  
Old July 3rd 19, 05:31 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul[_28_]
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Posts: 1,467
Default sil3114 sata card

T. Ment wrote:
On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 01:37:48 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

But now I think those two pins are for a HDD LED. Shorting it to ground
was probably a bad idea. Maybe that damaged the card.


This board has a boat load of surface mount capacitors.

There's probably just one bad component somewhere. Desoldering and
checking them all would take too much time. More than $9.49 worth.

Hey! I found a broken solder joint on one side of C41. Tomorrow I'll
repair it, and see if that helps.


As long as the two pins on the LED header were
not shoved into any other electrical potential,
odds are good you didn't hurt it.

+5V ------ Rseries -----X \
\___ use a LED, or short the pins,
X / won't hurt it. Top pin is (+).
|
activity ____|/
|\
v
|
GND

If you applied a hard rail (voltage source) to the bottom
pin, from elsewhere on the card, you could damage the
open collector drive transistor. If you short the header
pins together, the Rseries (180 ohms or so), protects
your investment.

Yes, shoving a card "hot" into a PCI slot, is a bad idea.
If the slot had advanced power/ground (sequencing), then
it might be OK. Regular slots don't provide sufficient
control of the entry angle of the card, to ensure bad things
don't happen.

You can test-boot your machine now, with the card removed, and
verify the PCI bus was not damaged.

*******

What surprises me about all these Silicon Image based products:

1) Silicon Image is no longer interested in storage.
That happened at least five years ago.

2) They probably sold off that business to someone else.

3) The downside of the sale, is no driver maintenance or BIOS
file maintenance. You're relying on Syba downloads page
for various materials. Silicon Image had its own site at one
time.

The mind-boggler, is why they're selling the cards with
the crusty old RAID BIOS in it. Nobody really expects a
card like that to be good at RAID. The lack of hardware
XOR means it would suck at RAID5. And I already recounted
a failure mode the SIL3112 had in RAID1 mode, that leaves
me wondering at their sanity.

What you want from these cards, is JBOD mode. And for someone
to volunteer at the company that is pumping this **** out,
to make sure there is a Windows 10 driver.

You can use a PCI to PCIe bridge chip, to allow the
usage of PCIe SATA chips with the PCI bus. People
have done that before. There is no particular advantage
to this, other than to put some distance between you
and the "smell" of SIL BIOS chips. The regular PCI bus
can't go faster than around 110MB/sec with a decent
burst size.

The SIL3124 is a SATA card, that could do PCI-X 64/66 and
would have four times the bandwidth of the SIL3114. But
on a regular motherboard it drops back to 32/33MHz and
the 110MB/sec figure. Modern hard drives can reach
250MB/sec (the record is a certain 15K drive that
does 300MB/sec). The drive is not hurt if it "goes slower".

Unless I see a company put some effort into support on these,
I couldn't in good conscience, touch this with a barge pole.
I mean, FFS, they're still using the same labels they
were using more than 10 years ago! That label on the ROM
gives me the chills... (It hides the chip part number
so we don't know what is under there.)

https://www.amazon.com/IOCrest-SATA-...Z8/ref=sr_1_36

It was bad enough working with this stuff, when it was supported.

Paul
  #16  
Old July 3rd 19, 03:49 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:31:42 -0400, Paul wrote:

What you want from these cards, is JBOD mode. And for someone
to volunteer at the company that is pumping this **** out,
to make sure there is a Windows 10 driver.


I need it for a DOS computer, to scrap a slowly failing PATA drive. I
need a card with BIOS, to boot from SATA and give performance comparable
to PATA. I have the drive, a 320 GB WD, my first drive ever, over 160GB.
It works, and I need a SATA card for standard PCI Not many choices for
standard PCI that I can find.


The SIL3124 is a SATA card, that could do PCI-X 64/66 and
would have four times the bandwidth of the SIL3114. But
on a regular motherboard it drops back to 32/33MHz and
the 110MB/sec figure. Modern hard drives can reach
250MB/sec (the record is a certain 15K drive that
does 300MB/sec). The drive is not hurt if it "goes slower".


A 3124 sounds good. They price at $35. I have to think about that.


Unless I see a company put some effort into support on these,
I couldn't in good conscience, touch this with a barge pole.


The only difference between old junk and new junk is the price. I like
old junk. I spend less money than people who demand new. Today's factory
new is tomorrow's old junk. In the end, it's all junk.

I repaired the solder joint, but still get disk write errors. There must
be some other defect not visible.


  #17  
Old July 3rd 19, 04:32 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Flasherly[_2_]
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Posts: 2,407
Default sil3114 sata card

On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 14:49:32 +0000, T. Ment
wrote:

I have the drive, a 320 GB WD, my first drive ever, over 160GB.
It works, and I need a SATA card for standard PCI Not many choices for
standard PCI that I can find.


I was given free USB HDD docking stations when buying something else.
But they're for a SATA drive;- some firmware limited to under 1 or
1.5T (FAT32), others 2T, and that's it -- never got around to docking
at over a 2T HDD. At the time I got them, they very cheap, among
various brands around $10 or $15. I like them, leave them on
occasions along with a tiny 3" 120V fan directed on the exposed half
of the mounted HDD, hooked up for unattended large transfers. Provided
they do not, on rarer occasions, sych-out with an error.

(Also aggravating, the controllers my docking stations fly on a
defragmentation routine, whereas my MB's SATA controllers are sludge
for fragmentation purposes.)

PATA connections, I wouldn't recommend the SATAPATA converter I
tried. ...DOS boots, & etc., (HIRENS supports USB in a DOS config),
or in as much and depending on whether a docking station is a viable
option to you.

Easy to say with only one Seagate 200G PATA drive left, never used
anymore, although full as a triplicate measure just to fill its space
among the rest of SATA, or a duplicate data backup drive set.
  #18  
Old July 4th 19, 12:06 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 14:49:32 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

I need it for a DOS computer


The Ebay seller told me it does not support DOS.

So I booted linux, and it works. Seems it needs a driver to poke its
chipset registers the right way.

Looks like my plan for DOS won't fly. I spent a lot of time and solder
learning that. Glad I only spent $9.49 on it. That's one reason to buy
old cheap junk.


  #19  
Old July 4th 19, 04:49 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul[_28_]
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Posts: 1,467
Default sil3114 sata card

T. Ment wrote:
On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 14:49:32 +0000, T. Ment wrote:

I need it for a DOS computer


The Ebay seller told me it does not support DOS.

So I booted linux, and it works. Seems it needs a driver to poke its
chipset registers the right way.

Looks like my plan for DOS won't fly. I spent a lot of time and solder
learning that. Glad I only spent $9.49 on it. That's one reason to buy
old cheap junk.



https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=49471

"If you want the SATA card to be usable by DOS
and Windows 9x, you need to flash it with the "base" BIOS.

The file you need is called b5403.bin

Reboot. After reboot, you should no longer see an option
to enter the RAID utility for the card."

"It didn't look like there were any IRQ conflicts
when the system booted up, but nonetheless, the card flashed
totally fine after moving to a different PCI slot."

That means you need an older motherboard, one with a motherboard
manual that details IRQ sharing. Do the flash there, then move
the card to a newer machine.

The 0x13 routine is what DOS uses, isn't it ? The BIOS routine
continues to be uses for ATA. For ATAPI, it seems to use
one of several ATAPI drivers (that you put on your MSDOS floppy).

Paul
  #20  
Old July 4th 19, 06:26 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
T. Ment
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Posts: 87
Default sil3114 sata card

On Wed, 03 Jul 2019 23:49:14 -0400, Paul wrote:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=49471

"If you want the SATA card to be usable by DOS
and Windows 9x, you need to flash it with the "base" BIOS.

The file you need is called b5403.bin


That's what I tried when the flashing problem started. My USB programmer
got the b5403 BIOS flashed, but it still does not work with DOS 6.22.

Your thread link mentions DOS 7. And the flasher program says to use
FreeDOS. Maybe they make a difference. All I know is, it's not working
with DOS 6.22.


Reboot. After reboot, you should no longer see an option
to enter the RAID utility for the card."

"It didn't look like there were any IRQ conflicts
when the system booted up, but nonetheless, the card flashed
totally fine after moving to a different PCI slot."

That means you need an older motherboard, one with a motherboard
manual that details IRQ sharing. Do the flash there, then move
the card to a newer machine.


Like he said, I tried different PCI slots. Didn't help. His card must be
flashable. I think mine is not.


The 0x13 routine is what DOS uses, isn't it ? The BIOS routine
continues to be uses for ATA. For ATAPI, it seems to use
one of several ATAPI drivers (that you put on your MSDOS floppy).


Yes 0x13 is the hard disk BIOS INT.

I have a multiboot setup with DOS, linux, and Windows. Before testing
the sil3114 card, I cloned the multiboot drive onto the SATA drive with
linux dd.

For testing, I have both drives in the computer. I boot DOS from PATA
(C, and DOS sees the SATA as D: I can change to it and display a
directory, but copying a large file fails. Same test works fine when I
boot linux.

I wonder why the flasher program recommends FreeDOS. Maybe I can try
that later. Or maybe I'll try a 2 port sil3512 card. I seem to recall
reading it supports DOS.



 




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