[vox-tech] Poor SATA performance

[Gabriel G. Rosa]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 07:58:34AM -0700, Ryan Castellucci wrote:
> I'm using 4 SATA hard drives on a SYBA SD-SATA-4P SATA card (Silicon Image 
> SIL3114A chipset) and I'm only getting 17MB/sec with hdparm -t on the drives, 
> and cpu utilization goes up to 100% while the test is going on. I'm running 
> this from knoppix 3.8, using 2.6.11.
> 


I saw very similar performance with a SIL3112 chipset on a $20 card. When
I replaced the card with a Promise card, performance/cpu usage went back
to normal.

The SIL worked fine with 1 drive, but not with 2.

> Anyone got any ideas? Does this SATA chipset just suck, or is something set 
> wrong?
> 

I'd say the chipset sucks, but at work I have some 3114s that work just fine,
albeit they're embedded into higher end motherboards, so... perhaps the bad
combination of the chipset and a cheap card makes >1 drive usage suck.

-Gabe