On Sun, 7 Feb 2016 12:16:21 -0000 (UTC),
(Andrew Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
Mike Tomlinson writes:
En el artículo , Andrew Gabriel
escribió:

They are well known for silent data corruption (great for testing ZFS
self-healing, but useless for any other filesystems).

Balls. I've used many SiI3112-based cards over the years with nary a
problem. They were a great alternative to the more expensive Adaptecs,
so much so that some motherboards included the Silicon Image BIOS in the
system BIOS, and performed better.

The Silicon Image BIOS is just to support managing and booting from RAID.
If you are not using RAID (or more specifically, not booting from RAIDed
disks), you don't need the SI BIOS, and the controller will still work
as it looks like an IDE controller.

Yup. Similar with Adaptec SCSI HBAs.

For the add-in cards, they produce
two BIOS's, one which supports RAID, and one which doesn't, and you can
flash either into the cards.

Silent data corruption is almost always due to improper termination.

Improper termination causes transport errors. Transport errors are not
silent - both ends get to know they happened and can take corrective
action.

Silent data corruption is when a block write completes without errors,
and a later read of the same block completes without errors, but the
data returned is not the last data written to that block. These can
only be detected by something higher up the stack (such as ZFS which
checksums every block on the disk, or in the absence of ZFS, by an
application which can detect data corruption).

SCSI termination is a black art. You need sacrificial goats, black
candles, a pentagram in the right shade of chalk, and to be standing on
the correct foot and facing in precisely the right direction while
chanting your incantation to the SCSI gods.

SCSI termination wasn't a black art,

+1

and these cards are not SCSI anyway.
SATA phy is point-to-point, so there's no termination configuration to
do - it's built into the phy chip at each end.

I love it when I read something from someone who knows what they are
talking and that corrects someone who thinks they do. ;-)

Cheers, T i m