sil3114 versus sil3114a

[Tulio Guimarães da Silva]

Gary D. Margiotta wrote:

> [snip]
> I would highly recommend the HighPoint 18x0 series of controllers.  I 
> believe the 1810 is a 4-port, and the 1820 is an 8-port SATA card.  I 
> just installed an 1820 (just over $200 at NewEgg) on an old PII-400 
> dual cpu machine, and it is insanely fast.  I have 4 320GB WD drives 
> attached to it in RAID5 config.

  Highpoint has some reasonable RAID and multiport IDE and SATA cards, 
and I´d bet the 18x0 series would be a good shot, since I already work 
with them. It´s natively supported by FreeBSD 5.4, and has additional 
support from Highpoint, what I consider a great thing, specially for 
management features.
  But if you´re going with 1820, I suggest you to get a 1820A, ´cause it 
has an onboard XOR processor which speeds up things a bit AND frees some 
CPU usage on RAID5 (important on not-so-new CPUs). ;).
  However, if you don´t need RAID5, there are other options from 
Highpoint itself, but I don´t have a clue about prices. I  would only 
not suggest vinum on RAID5 unless you have a really good machine (at 
least hyperthreaded), because it drains quite a bit from the CPU, but if 
it´s for personal use, or a low-end server, that could fit.

>
> The HPT card was detected by 5.4-RELEASE right out of the box, no 
> tinkering needed.  I installed the OS onto the RAID5 volume, and was 
> up and running in under an hour.
>
> Did I mention it's insanely fast?  It's running in a standard PCI 
> slot, since my motherboard is old, and doesn't have any 64 bit PCI 
> slots, but the card is OK with that, it's backwards compatible to 
> normal 32 bit slots for folks like me.  IF you have a new motherboard 
> with 64 bit slots, I can only imagine how fast it would be with > 6 
> year old hardware.

  In a last thought, speed will greately depend on the hardware you´re 
using (mobo, CPU, disks etc.), but they´re indeed quite good. I really 
hadn´t noticed the backwards compatibility in the specs, but it´s a nice 
feature - you´ll really like it if someday you can afford a 64bit, 
133MHz motherboard. :)
  And, as for reliability, i have two 1820A running rock-solid, 24/7, 
beside me, on 2 HP ML110 machines. It´s too early to say, since it 
hasn´t been yet 6 months, but we haven´t had a single issue, even when 
we decided to play with hot-swap. :)
  Have luck,

Tulio G. da Silva