Sil3112 Raid chip questions

[KevDaMan]

Hello everyone here's the issue. I Bought a GA7N400 Pro2 with ide raid and STAT raid. I have herd nonthing but bad things about the gigaraid chip and it's bad performance but I plan to use the SATA raid. The SATA chip is a Silicon Image Sil3112 chip and I would like to know if this is a slow performance chip like the IDE raid. If you have a different board but the same raid chip can you let me know what it performs like. I plan to but 2 WD Raptors and I dont want to waste my money if it's going to be the same speed as one drive.

Barton 2500+ @2300mhz (Volcano 11+ HSF) (1.74 vcore)
2x 512 mb ddr 400 generic ram
antec case with 4 case fans + 450 watt psu
asus geforce 4 Ti 4800se @300/600
WD 120gig 8mb cache + maxtor 40gig
KDS 19 inch Xtreme Flat CRT

[tyson-chris]

KevDaMan,

I have the NF7-S v2.0 with the same SATA Raid chip. Though at first, many people were getting hard drive corruption left and right, the issue is just about fixed on all boards. Silicon Image has also just released a new bios for the SIL3112 (4.2.27 I believe), which I'm using, but haven't really noticed any difference with.

The performance of the raid chip seems as good as any other to me. I'm running 2x120gb Maxtor SATA DM+9 drives in Raid-0 and getting about 115000 read/write in Atto, and 71,000 in Sandra. There was a huge thread before where everyone posted their raid-0 benches if you want to see screenies... If you do raid0, you definitely won't get the speed of 1 drive. Most people with 2xraptors in raid0 are using this SIL chip or the ICH5 in intel springdale/canterwood systems.

[KevDaMan]

Thanks for telling me that because I just got off the phone and orderd 2 WD Raptors which will be in tomorow. As for updating the bios on the raid controller how does that get done. I need a little advice on how to go about putting these 2 drives in a raid 0 setup. I have the GA7N 400Pro 2 board. Would i be right to say I have to reinstall windows xp and install the raid drivers at the begenning of the setup? any adivce would be appreicated!

[caRpetbomBer]

Is it possilbe just to flash the sil3112 raid chip on the nf7-s v2.0
I have the updflash.exe but i cant find the 4.2.27 file anywhere.

[tyson-chris]

Kev,

Yes, if you want windows on the raid stripe, then you will have to reinstall windows. Also, afaik, you can't just update the Raid bios. I flashed my mobo bios with a special modded bios that someone made that combined the newest 4.2.27 SIL bios with the mobo bios, but that was only for my board (v2.0 NF7-S). But I wouldn't worry about the new 4.2.27 bios, it doesn't really add anything as far as I know. The corruption is fixed in the newest SATA DRIVERS for windows. This you must get. Probably the driver disk that came with your mobo is an older one (mine was). Go to http://www.siliconimage.com/products/sii3112.asp, click on the Technical Documents Product Support at the bottom, and you'll be able to find the newest Windows Raid Drivers. Put those on a floppy... Do all this before you reinstall windows...


As for installing windows on the stripe, first you create the stripe in the SIL bios. So when you boot your computer, the Raid chip will detect the drives, and you'll see like, Press ALT+F3 or something to enter Raid Bios. There, you can set it to be Raid-0 (Stripe) and the stripe size. Different stripe sizes are good for different purposes, and you can probably search and find some good posts on it, but just for reference, I have mine set to a 16k stripe.

After creating the stripe, pop in your Windows install cd (boot from it), and at the beginning, once that blue screen starts, you'll see on the bottom, something like "Press F4 if you need to install SCSI drivers" or something to that effect. Have your SATA driver floppy in the floppy drive at the time. Press F4 then (or whatever key it is, I forget). After the other things load, it'll ask you which SCSI/SATA drivers you want to load, and will present a list from your floppy. Choose the 3112 ones, and you're good to go. Windows install should now detect your raid stripe like a normal hard drive and you can format and partition it however you want.

[caRpetbomBer]

The reason i want to try the new sil3112 bios driver is for some reaon my scores went down big time in HD tach with the new 19 nf7-s r2.0 bios.

I found the modded bios 19 with 4.2.27 and looks ok now. But then again i have 2 120 maxtor DM+9 drives in a raid 0 with serial to ide connections. With a stripe size of 64k.
All i get in HD tach is 88799.0
5489.0
50086.0

And in Sandra i get 47,964:( I wonder if its the stripe size or should i get some real Sata drives ROFL.

[KevDaMan]

I'm having a hard time finding the sil3112 bios driver on that website. Can you point me to the direct link. In about 15 hours time I'll be setting up the new raid and would love to have the newest bios.

[tyson-chris]

Carpet,

IIRC, there were significant differences between the DM+9 PATA and SATA versions. I'm not sure why, (I'm not going to say it's solely because of the SATA interface because I'm almost certain it's not, especially because the SATA drive is not native SATA but has a very high quality SATA-PATA bridge), but the benches of the SATA version are much higher than the PATA version. It might be that the SATA version uses 80gb platters and the PATA doesn't (not too sure about that either :P).

Those benches don't seem to far off from what I've seen of PATA DM+9's... I think storagereview.com did one of their detailed reviews of the PATA DM+9, so you can see their benches for reference. If you can afford the time, and care enough for that extra performance, you may want to experiment with different stripe sizes. Like I said before, I'm using a 16k stripe, and the default 4k cluster size. I do a fair bit of video capture and editing, and I've found 16k works pretty well for me, practically no dropped frames at full ntsc resolution, 720x480 :)

Kev,

I'm actually having trouble getting on to their site right now. I think I can't give you a direct link anyways, because they do some sort of session id in the url each time. But basically, go to my link, click on technical documents at the bottom of the page (the big image). A new window opens, with a navbar on the left side. Go to drivers, and I think it's referred to as 3x12 drivers. Get the "Windows Raid Driver", I think it's called. Don't confuse bios and drivers. They are two different things. The Raid BIOS, I don't think you can update without updating your mobo bios, so you'll have to wait until gigabyte releases a new mobo bios with the new raid bios in it. The drivers you can download, and should, from that webpage, and put onto a floppy.

[KevDaMan]

Yes I have the new drives downloaed from the site. I just picked up one of the dirves the company only could get 1 from there supplier untill monday. So I wont be doing raid until monday. Untill then I'll just insall 1 new Serial ATA WD raptor and see how it goes. I have a maxtor 40 gig which is makeing a loud scraping noise so I hope it dies a horrible death because I'm not to inmpressed with the life of maxtor dirves since I know a few people who have drives less than 2 years failing. I like western digital drives :) they work good and last long.

[mimimi]

I am trying to install Win XP SP3 on an old Abit NF7-S2 v2.0 and I got stuck on the Sil 3112a Drivers. More precisely upon copying the instalation files on the disk, the XP Setup cannot find the inf and sys files. (setup cannot copy the file Si3112r.inf....)

I have tried the drivers from the original Abit Install CD, from the Silicon Image website and the Abit website to no success.

Each driver I downloaded is comprised out of 4-5 files which are to be placed in the root of the floppy.
(TxTSetup.oem | Si3112r.inf | Si3112r.sys | SIISUPP.VXD | Si3112r.mpd )

I press F6 - specify additional devices, insert floppy, the setup loads the drivers, it sees the HDD, i format the HDD and then when the setup prepares to copy the bulk of the files it searches the floppy to no avail for the same files that are already in the root of the floppy.

I remember, the original floppy that worked had a certain folder structure which could be browsed, with the drivers divided for several operating systems.

I am willing to bet that upon copying the files, the XP Setup tries to look for them in different folders inside the floppy but i dont know the original folder structure.

Could any of you guys can find a backup of those old drivers or floppy and post it here pls?

thank you

[redduc900]

Assuming you're running the 32-bit version of XP, you'll need this file from Sil... 3112R_x86_10620_logo.zip (which contains TxtSetup.oem, si3112r.cat, si3112r.inf, si3112r.sys, SilSupp.dll, SiWinAcc.sys, and the readme.htm.)

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=63&cat=3

Then just extract the entire *.zip to a floppy.

[johan851]

If that fails (it shouldn't) you can also slipstream the drivers into the XP install CD. Look for an application called nLite to do this.

On another note, this is a six-year-old thread you've resurrected! In the future, you can just start a new one. :)

[Murdochs_mad]

mimimi,

I had the same problem while installing XP a couple of days ago, setup would find the driver on the floppy when going through the F6 part of setup but then couldn't read the files when it started to copy files to the hard drive, all it took was me to take the floppy out, put it back in and retry. prolly just a fussy floppy drive but worth a shot.