Silicon Image SATA controllers (was: sil3114 versus sil3114a)

[Dieter]

> The Silicon Image controllers are some of the worst out there, according
> to our ATA maintainer

I have a Silicon Image SATALink 3512 which has 2 ports and barely
reads 40 MB/s total from 2 drives.  I have a board with the
nforce4 and drives on 2 of its 4 ports which easily reads
~137 MB/s total sustained from the same drives (at this speed
the drives are the limiting factor).

Other than the throughput limit, the 3512 works fine.
The 3512 is on an Alpha running NetBSD.  The nforce4 is on
an AMD64 board running FreeBSD/NetBSD/Linux.

The 3114/3114a may be fine, and may even be the best choice for your
application, but I'd suggest doing your homework before getting one.