morlok

I recently purchased a Sil 680-based RAID ctlr. Yes, it's a low end ctlr, but I purchased it to get experience with RAID, and learn a little. The problem: The boot process proceeds notmally, and the ctlr prints out the msg: Sil 680 ATA/133 medley RAID controller BIOS Version 3.2.10 Press F3 to enter RAID utility. (That's all on one line, to be precise) HOWEVER, pressing F3 does nothing! (I verified that F3 works, by the way ;-) The supplied documentation for the ctlr was sparse, which is to be expected thes days - a fold-out broadsheet and a CD, along with cryptic instructions. I had to search the CD for the correct driver for it. The documentation does refer to various jumpers, however they do not match the ones on my card. F'rinstance, the manual that (I think :-( ) is for the card lists the following jumpers: JP Jumper Setting Description for 680. Default JP0 In BAR5 Disable Out Out BAR5 Enable JP1 In Device always RAID class In Out Whereas the card itself only has 3 stake jumpers, labelled: JP1 D1 D2 OK... What's a BAR5? In addition, reading between the lines, shouldn't the default be to RAID, which the document shows as defaulting to not RAID? My best guess is that F3 doesn't work because the RAID ctlr is being told by jumeprs that it ISN'T a RAID ctlr, but I can't prove this because the jumper descriptions and the actual jumpers dont match. Any help appreciated ----- Bob S

I go into a long explanation/digression about the SATA interface a few days ago. I got a blank look when I talked about the 'Sah-Tah' interface, and had to say Ess-Ay-Te-Ay to make myself clear. So, does anyone else pronounce it phonetically, or do you spell it out? And, should I say SaY-TAh, instead of Sah-Tah?

>BTW, when was the last time anyone ever pronounced tomato "Toe-Ma-Toe," outside of the context of the saying? The last time John Kerry spoke? ;-) ;-) 'maters is good enough for me.

>If the one of the raid1 drives dies, I break the mirror, backup the data, put in a new drive, and then re-mirror. Check to see if your RAID ctlr has the option to add a standby drive, it sits on an unused port on one of the channels and you'll be able to rebuild on the spot, without even shutting off the power.

>I think so too, otherwise those 12-channel controllers would be a waste. If you put both drives of a mirrored set on the same channel, the R/W operations would have to be sequential, cutting down performance. One channel, one I/O operation at a time.

> am sorry to hear that. Well at least we tried. >I wish you luck in your pursuit! Problem solved! I blew off the rest of the afternoon, and took advantage of the near perfect weather here in Twin Mountain to 'Take a Hike!' I thought about it while walking, and decided to do what (in retrospect) I should have done in the first place. When I bought the cards, I had also purchased two (actually 4, since I intend to RAID both front-line machines) for it. Up to this point, I had been installing a couple of old drives that had developed errors on them, but were still alive; they both reported themselved to the standard IDE BIOS when booting, and correctly identified themseves as to type and size (I set the BIOS to auto, rebooted, and all the params came up correct). One had massive read errors in the inner 3rd of the disk, the other would give seek errors, but they still were alive and saluting the BIOS at startup. Now, at this point, I knew that: The SIl Bios wouldn't recognize F3 and enter the BIOS with no drives attached. Ditto with one drive attached. Ditto with two drives attached. I had been using the bad drives (again, one with simple bad sectors, one with seeks errors) because, this being my first foray into RAID, I didn't know what to expect; reading documentation is one thing, DOING is another. I thought I'd play with disposable parts first. So, just for grins and giggles, I got out two of the new drives and plugged them in, one set as master on each channel. Mirabile Dictu! ... it alive! Hitting <F3> enters the BIOS, and the 2 drives are correctly recognized as to mfr and ID/capacity. Now the fun begins I added a floppy drive to the testbed, and inserted a bootable disk. I set up a simple mirrored array of two drives (which was the goal in the first place) It works, at this point I am booting to the floppy only. I pull one of the drives - it works (recognizes the remaining drive), boot to floppy I pull both drives - it doesn't work, BIOS doesn't respond to <F3>, but boots to floppy. I add the 'bad sector' drive. BIOS responds to <F3>, shows correct drive ID/capacity I tried to delete the RAID set, no go. remove drive, substitute 'bad seek' drive. Hangs in RAID BIOS, won't respond to <F3>, won't proceed to floppy boot. Add both bad drives, ditto. remove really bad ;-) drive, responds as previous, boots to floppy. Still won't allow deletion of RAID array. Connect 2 good drives Drive recognizes array. Delete RAID set Interesting anomaly: Drives now show up as TWO raid sets, each of one drive. Trying to delete these one-member RAID sets accomplishes nothing, typing in a RAID set # causes it to just keep asking. Re-creating the RAID set combines the two 1-member RAID sets. So, from this I gather that: These RAID ctlrs aren't particularly intelligent, and don't handle error conditions very well. I was surprised that it/they needed a good pair of drives to establish the RAID set, then had mediocre error handling capability after that. OTOH, there's an old adage that goes; 'Don't test for an error condition you're not prepared to handle'. Oh, well, I got the ctlrs for cheap, so it's the exposition of the another old adage: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR OTOH, in navigating to get here I just read a post/thread about a gut who had a disaster on a Linux RAID5 array. Perhaps price has nothing to do with the quality of the S/W? All in all, I'd rather have spent the time hiking ;-) or is that ;-( Thanks to Mike for doing the research on the ctlr, I did get newer , and more elaborate, versions of the docs.

OK, I pursued the issue further, and... teh news ain't good. I went to flash the BIOS, and the flash utility, supplied bySil, didn't find the BIOS EPROM in its list of recognized parts. SO, I got out my magnifying glass, and found that the EPROMchip is a 27xxx series device, which means that it is NOT a flash-able device, rather a OTP (one-time-programmable) device meant for OEMs. I searched th eweb as far as a few hours took me, and found no documentation that matched the jumper configuration on teh cards that I have. The next step is to try all the possible combinations of the 3 jumpers, to see if that accomplishes anything. Won't take long, as one of the cars is in a testbed mobo that's spread out on the bench. BTW, I tried connecting two drives, as someone told me that some RAID ctlrs like to see RAIDable devices out on their channels; if nothing is connected, they will petulantly refuse to do anything. No go. The experiment goes on :-(

>Wow, again Silicon Image did it again! Silicon Image Customer Resource Center OK. I've got it. I DLed everything I could find. It'll take a while to figure out what I should do. Reading between the lines at SIL, the cards aren't RAID capable out of teh box, you have to flash the RAID BIOS in order to get the RAID functionality. That's a guess, but that's what I get from reading the on-line pages that accompany the DL links. ----- Bob S

WOW!!! thanks for the help! I do have a problem with the site, though. The first one, listing the two files to D/L, comes up fine, but when I click on the files listed, I get a seperate window that immediately says 'done' (I waited a minute or more to make sure). Again, thanks for the help, it's far more than I expected. ----- Bob S

>Or is it that you only can not access the BIOS configuration by pressing F3? Yes. It will pause for a few seconds with the 'Press F3' message, not do anything (regardless of how hard you pound on F3 ) and then the boot process continues sucessfully. One of the cards is in this system right now (I bought two to play with). BTW, something I thought of today and tried out: I actually attached a drive to the ctlr, still no go. I don't have two spare drives (well, I could throw a bad one on, just so it'll have a load on the bus), and have been using a test bed system that has the same mobo. thanks again Bob S

>Did you update it to 3.2.10 yourself, or did it come like that? It came out of the box with 3.2.10. I purchased it recently, and it has a DOM of 1204, which makes it fairly new. Reflashing the BIOS is no problem, as I've done several mobos in the past. That's assuming, of course, that the CD comes with its flash writing tool, which is a leap of faith ;-). I assume it's on the net somewehre, as I've already looked up thei site to figure out what those jumpers on my no-name board are for (no no avail I might add :-( ) thanks for the help!