Problem with two SATA HDD dives on Sil 3512 controller.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Good luck

While syba cards are EXTREMLY affordable their support systems suck.

I bought the same style card from them and payed via paypal. It didn't come with a drivers disk and after 5 emails asking for working drivers I finally had to put in a resolution asking for a payment reversal in paypal to get the drivers...

Took me 4+ weeks to get drivers for the damned card...

[jaclaz]

I am not sure to get it right.

Here:

http://it.us.syba.com/support_download/download/73-0203-1.html

There are two files liinked to mentioning Windows98:

http://it.us.syba.com/bin/silicon_image/sil3112-raid/sil3112-raid_drv_winall_v1.0.0.40.zip <- sil3112-raid_drv_winall_v1.0.0.40.zip

and:

http://it.us.syba.com/bin/silicon_image/sil3112-raid/sil3112-raid_medley_v1.0.0.19%20.zip <- sil3112-raid_medley_v1.0.0.19%20.zip

On page:

http://www.sybausa.com/resource/SD-SATA150R/

there is (including the one you mentioned) these three:

http://www.sybausa.com/resource/SD-SATA150R/SD-SATA150R_Windows_98SE-ME-NT4-2000-XP-Server2003-XP64-bit-Vista-7-MacOSX-Linux-Netware.zip

http://www.sybausa.com/resource/SD-SATA150R/SD-SATA150R_Windows_98SE-Me-2000-Server_2003-XP-NT_4.0,-Vista-7-_Linux.rar

http://www.sybausa.com/resource/SD-SATA150R/SD-SATA150R_Windows_98SE-Me-2000-Windows_Server_2003-XP-NT_4.0-Vista-7-_Linux.zip

None of these contain a suitable Win98 driver?

I would also chek here:

http://www.wecandobetter.com/dnload/BartPE/SourcefilesBkup/drivers/SCSIAdapter/SYBA-SATA-3x12-RAID-2P/

jaclaz

Edited December 19, 2011 by jaclaz

[rloew]

A version of my SATA Patch should be able to handle these cards.

[TmEE]

I have found that Silicon Image cards need to have their BIOS match the driver, if that's not the case you'll get lockups and the like once you get into windows, especially during driver install or on next reboot once driver is installed. Disabling the on-card BIOS fixes that, but it denies possibility to use these drives in DOS mode or boot from them.

[jaclaz]

I have found that Silicon Image cards need to have their BIOS match the driver, if that's not the case you'll get lockups and the like once you get into windows, especially during driver install or on next reboot once driver is installed. Disabling the on-card BIOS fixes that, but it denies possibility to use these drives in DOS mode or boot from them.

Since the BIOS is flashable and available, it could be interesting if you could detail HOW exactly the driver is matched to the BIOS.

http://www.wimsbios.com/forum/topic10688.html

jaclaz

[pointertovoid]

My experience is with SiI 3112 and 3124, not the similar 3512.

The driver must match the Bios, that is either Raid or non-raid. Raid Bios and drivers can use disks individually. Performance is the same except the pre-boot time: 4s added by Raid Bios, 2s by non-Raid. Flashing worked easily for me several times.

Both are very fast controllers, slightly faster than the integrated Intel ones. Shameless.

Win95-98-Me does not make use of Ahci, and Ahci is a huge performance improvement. The SiI3112, which has drivers for W98-Me, has no Ahci mode (=parallel requests). The SiI3124 has them, very efficient; no driver for W98-Me, and I ignore its speed with default drivers.

The SiI3124 does hotswap. Probably difficult on W98-Me. With W2k and fixed drives it needs

http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm

but v2.0.0.0 is really the latest for W2k and it does not stop the spindle so you shouldn't unplug it, sob. XP, yes.

DMA checkbox comes with the default Windows drivers. Specific drivers may have one or not, at a different location. They often have no such checkbox because they always enable DMA and UDMA.

The SiI3124 writes the description of Raid arrays on the disks instead of a Flash memory on the controller card. This means that you can move your disks between two controllers and a Raid still works. Just as the Promise FT100 did. Or move them between ports of your controller, and so on. BUT if one disk belonged once to a Raid group and you didn't disband this group using the Bios, connecting said disk to a SiI 3124 lets it go crazy. Could this possibly be your case?

One disk speed benchmark (HdTach?) did destroy raid arrays on the Promise Ft100 controller, supposedly by overwriting the badly protected sector where the Ft100 wrote the description of the array (how embarrassing, how embarrassing). I couldn't reproduce this failure with the SiI3124, which may protect said sector better.

Good luck with SiI, these are the best Sata controllers on Pci. But this operation needs some time before it works. Raid-0 isn't worth it now that a single disk saturates the Pci bandwidth, but Ahci is worth it with Win Nt4-Nt5, and Sata on an older machine is certainly useful. I ran a Sata SSD on a PIII Tualatin and it brings a lot. Big disk capacity for cheap is one other reason. And if you change the mobo some day, you can keep your Sata disks.

Edited December 23, 2011 by pointertovoid

[rloew]

If the card BIOS uses AHCI and cannot be changed, it cannot be used with Windows 9X even in compatability mode.

[TmEE]

Since the BIOS is flashable and available, it could be interesting if you could detail HOW exactly the driver is matched to the BIOS

It seemed to me that when you had driver from like 2004 and BIOS from 2008 it would not work out, but if you had BIOS from 2004 it would work. (Numbers I pulled out of my rear, to give the idea).

I got stack errors, it kind of seems the driver got confused or something and eventually caused a stack fault.

[I41Mar]

Hello!

Sorry for the late replay.

Currently I have the PC P3 at the computer technician shop in order to test the Syba PCI SATA card: SD-SATA150R with SIL3512 chipset.

I checked the PCI card BIOS and is it the version 4.3.83. I then used correctly the PCI card, after several failed attempts with the wrong drivers, finally founding the right driver on the official Silicon Image website:

- Silicon Image Serial ATA Raid driver for the SiI 3x12 controllers Ver 1.0.60.0 (File found on website: 3112Raid_x86_10600_logo.zip).

The SATA HD drive is recognized correctly but the data transfer speed seems quite similar to that of the other HD drive Pata!

At first impression it seems to me that the limit, right in my case of the old PC P3, is given instead by the motherboard (11 years old!)

These are the PC specs:

Intel Pentium IIIE Coppermine 700MHz, Socket 370, RAM 512Mb, MotherBoard PCChips M754LMR+, Chipset ULi/ALi M1631 ALADDiN TNT2, VideoCard NVIDIA Aladdin TNT2.

Over the next few days I will give more precise information about the speed that I found in the following 3 cases:

PATA HD (attached to the motherboard), HD Sata (attached to PCI card), USB 2.0 HD (attached to USB 2.0 PCI card).

Thank you from Italy for your help, for your kindness and availability!

I41Mar

Note 1: So far I have not received any useful indication from the Syba support, despite the message I sent them through its official website, but at this point it becomes really irrelevant.

Note 2:

Quote: 'DMA checkbox comes with the default Windows drivers. Specific drivers may have one or not, at a different location. They often have no such checkbox because they always enable DMA and UDMA.'

A.: I my case, in the driver's installed properties there isn't any indication of DMA checkbox, but the transfer speed is not anymore the previous slow 1 Mb/sec resulting without any driver installed!

PS: In order not to use any internal HD drive, as would be nice and sweet to run the Win98SE operating system on an external USB 2.0 HD drive, booting from a floppy disk if necessary!

Edited December 23, 2011 by I41Mar

[rloew]

PS: In order not to use any internal HD drive, as would be nice and sweet to run the Win98SE operating system on an external USB 2.0 HD drive, booting from a floppy disk if necessary!

It can be done and a floppy is not needed. The only requirement is that the BIOS must recognize the USB Device.

[I41Mar]

@ rloew

Could you kindly give me some more details about running Win98SE on an external USB HD?

Have You reached a USB2 speed?

I am very intrigued!

Thank you.

I41mar

Edited December 27, 2011 by I41Mar

[rloew]

@ rloew

Could you kindly give me some more details about running Win98SE on an external USB HD?

Have You reached a USB2 speed?

I am very intrigued!

Thank you.

I41mar

I didn't run any speed tests. I was using an USB Flash Drive. It runs in compatability mode using the BIOS Driver.

[Queue]

Adding some info to this slightly aged thread; I haven't posted here in forever, but after a week of headaches I wanted to share my results for any other 9x users with some form of SiI3112/3512 SATA card.

Ok, so here's the setup:

I've had a SiI3512 chipset SATA card in my 98SE computer for something like 3 years. It handles a single 500 GB Western Digital hard drive. Up until today, it had firmware 4.3.84 (RAID-capable firmware) and I was using driver version 1.0.60.0 (the highest version of 9x-compatible drivers that went with the RAID firmware).

I had over 300 GB of data on the drive, and no problems. Then I made a decent sized data backup, adding another 45 GB to the drive. The file transfer was successful. But there was a problem: reading some of the newly written files off the drive would error, and then massive (apparent) file name corruption would occur. Visually, it looked like the >127 GB issue where you wind up with corrupt folder and file names.

Obviously this was terrifying (I have a backup of all the data, but still, terrifying). I ctrl+alt+deleted twice to do a soft reboot. Once back in Windows, the drive appeared unharmed. Files were there, file names were correct, etc. However, if I tried to read some of the new files, the problem would occur again, and it required a Windows restart to fix. I couldn't restart Windows properly (or shutdown) without a hang (while I could before this recent addition of 45 GB of data).

I was then busy, seeing as this was Thanksgiving week, so I avoided aggravating the problem by adding or deleting files on said drive. During any free time, I scoured the internet for what information I could find about the SiI3512 chipset, particularly pertaining to 9x (which of course was basically all from MSFN).

After mulling it over, sifting through driver .inf's to check for 9x entries, and making certain the 3512 and 3112 firmware was interchangeable, I did the following:

- Flash the firmware to version 4.2.84 (this is the non-RAID equivalent to the firmware I had been using).

- Use driver version 1.2.0.57 (these drivers are 3 years older than the drivers I'd used previously, and the non-RAID version).

This appears to have fixed my problem. I can read any of the new 45 GB of files without triggering a failure, and notably they all appear to have been written without error. All other files on the drive that I've checked have been fine.

I switched to the non-RAID firmware because I wasn't ever going to use the RAID feature and the non-RAID firmware has a shorter delay during system boot (so I boot 2 seconds faster, woo).

I switched to an ancient version of the drivers simply because when you search the Silicon Image website for SiI3x12 Win9x drivers, it specifically only shows that one driver version. The non-RAID drivers that match the RAID drivers I was previously using would be version 1.3.67.0, and they should load under 9x, but seeing as I just got the problem to go away, I haven't tested any other non-RAID drivers yet.

I may feel adventurous next week and try all drivers between and including 1.2.0.57 to 1.3.67.0, but for now I just wanted to report that there may be an issue with version 1.0.60.0 of the RAID-capable drivers on Win9x.

Keep in mind that driver version numbers are a mess for the SiI3x12 chipset: the RAID and non-RAID drivers have different numbering, and the Silicon Image driver listings and numberings have typos.

Queue

[Nomen]

My win-98se system is using SI3112r.mpd (version 1.0.0.51) and I'm not seeing any sort of file-corruption problems on any of the SATA drives I connect (500 gb, 700 gb, 1.5 tb).

The only problem I have is that free-space gets out of sync and I have to run scandisk once every 2 or 3 months.