Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

[Mercutio]

I manage a server where backups to a USB drive have gotten to the point where they exceed the window of time allotted for daily maintenance due to the server's production schedule (one hour a day, seven days a week).

To this point, backups have been written to an external USB2 drive. I need the backups to go faster. I don't have any available internal SATA ports so it's time to put in some sort of eSATA/SAS interface, right?

So I bought an inexpensive PCIe eSATA controller based on a Sil3132 chipset. In point of fact, every card I can find that has built-in eSATA ports is a Sil3132-based device (this is a 1U server; I'd have a hard time doing anything else).

Plugged the card in, loaded the drivers and... no eSATA drives. The drives work. I formatted them in the enclosures on a desktop with working ports.

The card's manufacturer suggested I try flashing the card's BIOS to the latest version, but my card is already the latest BIOS that's supplied by both that manufacturer and by Silicon Image.

So I got another card. Different manufacturer, same chipset. Same thing. Drives aren't detected. Different known-working drive enclosure? Same thing. Drives aren't detected.

Card #3. Same thing.

Tyan: "No idea. Ask the people who made the card."
People who made the cards: "It's not us. It's the motherboard/drive/enclosure."
Silicon Image: "We don't deal with end users."

I've probably put 20 hours into what should have been 10 minutes of down time for these people.

 

[ddrueding]

Ouch. Get a different raid card for the internal drives and the route the onboard ports to an esata bracket?

 

[Mercutio]

Ouch. Get a different raid card for the internal drives and the route the onboard ports to an esata bracket?

I've thought about doing that, but of course you know how much Windows likes having the disk controller for the boot drives changed.

I also looked in to getting a one or two drive external SAS enclosure and moving to a grown-up storage system but I can't find one for anything less than four drives and at that point, the stupid thing won't really qualify as removable storage.

 

[Howell]

http://www.fantomdrives.com/products/datadockii.htm

Would GigE allow your backups to fit within the window?

 

[Mercutio]

Would GigE allow your backups to fi...TE] In theory, yes. In practice, I doubt it.

 

[Stereodude]

USB 3.0 time?

Are you trying to hotplug the drives? Are the drives in an external enclosure? Have you tried the drives outside of their enclosures using a eSATA to SATA cable?

 

[Mercutio]

Are you trying to hotplug the drives? Are the drives in an external enclosure? Have you tried the drives outside of their enclosures using a eSATA to SATA cable?

No. Yes. Yes.

The drives work fine. The enclosures work fine when connected to a different machine on a native eSATA port.

 

[Stereodude]

Have you tried the cards in another system?

 

[Mercutio]

Have you tried the cards in another system?

Not yet. Every time I'm there I'm under the gun to get crap done in the maintenance window. It's statistically improbable that I got three bad cards from three different vendors, though.

 

[Stereodude]

Not yet. Every time I'm there I'm under the gun to get crap done in the maintenance window. It's statistically improbable that I got three bad cards from three different vendors, though.

I agree. Which is why you should test the cards in another PC. What do the reviews for the cards say over at Newegg (assuming they sell them)? I have to assume the cards can't all be complete crap, which means the motherboard may be the issues.

 

[Mercutio]

Tyan says it's not their fault, and I don't have ready access to test another of that particular variety of GT20.

But given my past experiences with Silicon Image, I'm not willing to discount the possibility that everything with one of their chips in it might be garbage.

 

[Will Rickards]

What about a newer 6Gb/s Esata card? Would that use a silicon image chipset? They should be backwards compatible.

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't seen any that have onboard eSATA ports.

 

[Will Rickards]

I'm confused then, you wanted an esata port but your using the header on the board rather than the ports that stick out the back of the PC?

 

[Mercutio]

There's only one place to put a card in a 1U server. If the card has internal SATA ports but not an eSATA port, there's no place to put a plate with an eSATA port on it. The card would need the eSATA port.

All the internal drive bays and ports are in use.

 

[Will Rickards]

This one has one external and one internal sata port.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158206&Tpk=N82E16815158206

 

[Mercutio]

That's still a Silicon Image chip.

 

[time]

Back up to the local drive array first (optionally using compression). You should easily be able to complete that in your time window, then it doesn't matter how long the transfer to external media takes.

 

[LunarMist]

I've had at least 5 of those cheap cards in various systems, at one point even three on one motherboard, and they all worked fine with hotswap. Maybe there is some hardware incompatibility with your motherboard.

 

[Mercutio]

Back up to the local drive array first (optionally using compression). You should easily be able to complete that in your time window, then it doesn't matter how long the transfer to external media takes.

I'm not sure what you mean.

Currently, there are two RAID1 arrays in that machine, one for the OS and one for the databases and file share stuff. I can back up the OS array on the other drive, but the other array's (differential backups) won't fit on the OS drive.

 

[time]

Does your differential backup need to compare original data with a full backup on your removable media? Any reason you can't rely on incremental? If so, can you write the (temporary) backup back to the data array rather than the OS array?

There are generally two types of files, documents and database. There's no point in trying to do a differential backup on a database.

Database dumps usually compress much better with a dedicated compression program rather than the on-the-fly style normally utilized by backup software. But you'd have to test that hypothesis in your actual situation. Does the database support export of snapshots to minimize downtime?

 

[Mercutio]

Database dumps usually compress much better with a dedicated compression program rather than the on-the-fly style normally utilized by backup software. But you'd have to test that hypothesis in your actual situation. Does the database support export of snapshots to minimize downtime?

The big database is SQLbase. It dismounts and dumps a snapshot once a day and has its own maintenance setup, but that still needs to go in with the larger system backup.

I'm doing a full backup once a week and differentials through the week. The removable drive is supposed to be replaced daily and taken off site. Honestly, this procedure is a holdover from how things were done with tapes, but the size of the database snapshots is the single biggest reason the backups take so damned long.

 

[ddrueding]

How about simultaneously backing up the DB dump and file store to a pair of USB drives?

 

[Mercutio]

I'd rather have eSATA work the way it's supposed to.

 

[LunarMist]

Surely there must be other controller cards with different chipsets that you could try. Maybe Marvell?

 

[ddrueding]

Add-on eSATA cards are a bit of a niche market, there may well only be one chip maker who has bothered to commercialize it.

 

[LunarMist]

Yeah. There don't seem to be as many different cards as in the past and the 1U is another limiting factor. :???:

 

[Will Rickards]

Are you sure that is silicon image? It looks like a Marvel M on it to me.

From the product page online it is a Marvell - 9128
http://us.startech.com/product/PEXS...Gbps-PCI-Express-SATA-Controller-Adapter-Card

 

[Sol]

I second the USB 3 option. If USB 2 was O.K then USB 3 should be fine, and the drive will be the bottle neck anyway.

I've seen issues with SATA cards where they've somehow used the same resources as the on board sata (IDE channel emulation or some such stupidity) and consequently only worked if you didn't have anything plugged in to the on board SATA. You might be able to play around with the bios settings for the onboard ports and somehow get the card to work. But given the need to get it sorted in a time window USB 3 would still get my vote.

 

[time]

Are you sure that is silicon image? It looks like a Marvel M on it to me.

Agreed.

 

[mubs]

FW 800?

 

[LunarMist]

FW is dying out in consumer applications now. I think it might be difficult to replace in a few years.

 

[mangyDOG]

I use an adaptec eSata card (which is based on the SI chip) and it works most of the time without any fuss. The two issues I have has are:

1) need to use a short eSata cable, I had lots of trouble until I changed to a high quality 50cm cable rather than the default 100cm cables.

2) occasionally some drives don't hot plug but shutting down both the drive and the PC and starting the drive first then the PC fixes the problem. This is is very rare now that I have replace the eSata cable.

Cheers,
mangyDOG.

 

[Mercutio]

I bought the Marvell card. I don't know if I'll get to try it before next week, but at least I have it now.

 

[Stereodude]

Have you tried any of those 3 cards in another PC? Since it doesn't have 3 slots they all can't be installed in there at once. I bet they work when they're not plugged into that Tyan motherboard.

 

[Mercutio]

I won't be able to go out there again until next week.

The theory that IDE emulation or something similar is the source of the problem makes a lot of sense, but of course that's something I can't correct without having to do a repair install of Windows and that's not going to happen on that machine, either.

The external cables that came with the drives are 1m long. I don't think I've ever seen them in any other size; they're the ones that were provided with the enclosures.

The Marvell-based controller is the last thing I'm going to try before I write it off and switch to Firewire 800 or something.

 

[mangyDOG]

I found this at a US website:
http://www.cablegear.com/eSATA-3001.html

cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[Mercutio]

So to answer my own question, "can Silicon Image do anything right?", the answer is no, it can't.

I switched to a Marvell 6Gbps controller and magically everything worked the first time I plugged it all in. Backup time dropped to a third of what it was on USB2.

 

[LunarMist]

What else does silicon image do other than make controller chips?

 

[Stereodude]

What else does silicon image do other than make controller chips?

Make HDMI and DVI TMDS.