SIIG SATA3112A PCI sometimes freezes on boot

[lbeachmike]

Hey guys -

I have a SIIG 3112A PCI 2-port SATA card which has been occassionally freezing up during bootup.

When I normally boot my machine, it first detects all drives via my mobo bios (ASRock939Dual, Bios v1.40) - that works fine.

It then proceeds to the next screen which shows the info on the SIIG card - it displays the chipset - 3112A and BIOS (4.2.02) - and then ordinarily detects my additional two SATA drives.

However, it is beginning to frequently freeze right after displaying the card's BIOS info, and before detecting the drives.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Mike

[dajogejr]

Reseat the card. Do you have the latest drivers installed for that card?
Also...run the HDD diagnostics on the drives.

I had a raptor go bad on mine, but my Asus has that controller onboard.
Freezing, running slow...etc.

RMA'd the drive with WD, good as new.

[Midknyte]

how many drives are you running? the MB already supports 3 SATA drives. If you are running 5 SATA drives, then I would also look at your power supply.

did you update the firmware on the SATA card?

did you try changing the boot order? even if you are not booting from the SATA card, you could put that ahead of the onboard (if the bios has that setting)

[lbeachmike]

Thanks for both responses -

Some quickie responses -

Machine is at home - I am at office. I'll reseat the card tonight.

HDD diags - is this a specific s/w package or are you referring generically to any HD diags? I ran Seatools last night on everything.

There are two Seagate drives on this card. I have two Raptors on the SATA 1 ports off the mobo, and the new SATA2 Seagate drive on the mobo's on-board SATA2 port.

So, I have these five SATA drives, plus one PATA drive and two CD/DVD drives and a floppy being supplied from the PSU. I think my PSU should have sufficient headroom for the load, but any guidance would be appreciated. I'll provide the PSU details when I get home.

I did not update the firmware on the SATA card because SIIG's site appears to suggest against doing so - unless I've misinterpreted their less-than-user-friendly support details.

I do not have any OS on the two drives that are hanging off of that card - so I can't boot off of any of them unless I were to switch things around. It's only an issue because it freezes ahead of the detection of the drives it is controlling.

mrk

[Midknyte]

just because you set a drive to boot first, doesn't mean you must boot from it. it will look for boot info, won't find it, then continue down the line to the next drive. that's why it's boot FIRST, not boot ONLY.

[lbeachmike]

Hey - that's an excellent point :) and your original note now makes more sense.

Did I mention being at work? They have stolen my brain here in this place, but alas I'm now heading home to restle with my rebellious PC.

I cannot directly change the boot order in the way you suggest - this BIOS has a different way of dealing with boot order - it has three categories that you select (ie. Hard Drive, CD, Floppy, USB, etc.) Then, within that category, you specify the order it will look at the individual devices. So, within the category of Hard Drives, I can place the two drives that are on that card atop the boot order. But that's really not where things are going wrong. Things are freezing up at the very point where the card itself is looking to detect the drives connected to it and report what it has detected. That's where the freeze-up occurs. Boot order would come into play after the card has determined what drives it has to offer into the mix.

I'm thinking along the lines of reseating the card as well. But I also question whether or not the BIOS on the card could be related to the issue.

I'm open to any and all suggestions.

I'm really getting tired of having all of my electronics rebel on me lately. I had a great track record in the past and used to make fun of a good friend of mine for having all of the issues I'm now having. Some sort of payback perhaps.

Thanks.

Mike

[lbeachmike]

Hey guys - this is my power supply -

Antec NeoPower 480 Watt ATX12V

Should be sufficient, right?

Thanx.

Mike

[Midknyte]

Tech Tools (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=173743)

use the power supply calculator or download overclockulator just to be sure. you have a lot of drives in there, dude.

[lbeachmike]

**** you're quick!

About to calculate and check docs that came with package. Then will be reseating my card.

Thanks.

mrk

[lbeachmike]

Okay - I'm getting close to the rating on the PSU via the calculator, but the calculator appears to use peak power and thus is looking at worst case - system being under a heavy loading/utilization.

I come in somewhere between 420W and 470W.

So, looks like it would be prudent to get myself a little bit more headroom.

Does it seem as if this is too close for comfort? Will any of the available monitoring tools give me actual consumption?

Thanks.

mrk

[lbeachmike]

Reseated the card. So far so good.

However, seperately, I'm still wondering if I'm cutting things too close on the PSU.

Please note that I am not overclocking anything.

Anyhow, I hope to replace this card with a SATA2 version within a month or two. Just looking prices to drop a bit - SATA2 cards are expensive right now.

Thanks for your help guys.

Mike

[dajogejr]

I'd wait on that SATA2 card. It's a waste of money. Your drives can only move between 100 to 150MB/s ....half that of the rated 300MB/s of a SATA2 card.
I'd wait until hard drives mature enough to use all of that bandwidth...
until then, I think you're wasting your money....

Not to mention, since you're using a PCI card...and the SATA is not onboard...it's slowing down even further...

I don't know off hand how fast PCI's move data...but it's less than the hard drives are rated at.

Someone will pipe in with the exact numbers, I'm sure....

[lbeachmike]

Agreed - and I intend to wait. However, when I ultimately need to swapout my last PATA drive with a new SATA, I have no more SATA ports.

Then again, I've not done any benchmarks yet, but I believe that my new Seagate SATA II drive is actually pretty darn fast running on the SATA2 port on my mobo. That's in comparison to my Raptor drives. I'll have to run some benchmarks to see if this is for real or hallucinations :)

I've noticed that all new cards released thus far that are SATA2 PCIe x1 cards are *all* 2-port cards. Is this due to bandwidth limitations of using the x1 PCIe slot?

Mike

[dajogejr]

Might want to think about a new Mobo....some new ones I've see have 6 or 8 SATA ports.

I'm trying to figure out why someone would need that many hard drives, though....

[lbeachmike]

Why so many drives? Storage, redundancy, flexibility. Moreso storage.

If I replace everything at once with 500 gig, I'd not need as many drives.

New mobo? This is a new mobo. Brand new. The tradeoff was having AGP and PCIe so that I don't need to immediately replace my video card, while moving to a slot 939.

I realize things are moving fast, and I was unable to find a better solution at my time of purchase.

The reality is that the mobo was only 69 bucks shipped to my door. They'll certainly introduce a newer version at some point, which might be a much more cost-efficient alternative at that point in time than buying upgrade cards.

If I owned a PCIe video card, a change of mobo would definitely become the most efficient alternative. It's tricky amidst change and evolution of so much technology.

Ideally, I also wanted on-board WIFI. I'm sure that will become commonplace at some point.

It really never does end. I hate buying bleeding edge technology that is immediately outdated as soon as I have it running nicely.

But, I guess that's why we're all here - and that's what keeps Sysopt such an interesting place.

It's sort of ironic how all of the performance improvements we try to squeeze out of our machines seem to occupy so much more of our time than the ultimate gain in efficiency or productivity.

mrk

[Midknyte]

one problem is that there are already 2 sata controllers on your board. the pci card makes that three. I've seen similar problems with an IDE card.

PCI bus is limited to 132MBps, much less for a single card.

I think you're pushing it with the power, but see how it goes. once you start consolidating drives, you should be ok.

[lbeachmike]

If the PCI bus is limited to 132MBps, that means that you cannot even get full throughput from a single SATA drive interfaced via a PCI card?

I guess that is where PCIe comes into the mix and why the new SATA2 cards are all PCIe x1 .... ?

That is definitely a problem. As far as any consolidation goes, I plan on at least having five drives in place.

What specific effects would I notice if the PSU is inadequate? I don't expect it's an issue, because there really would never be the case of everything being fired at full load all at the same time - so, there's probably lots of headroom. I'd also imagine that the Antec supply likely has some headroom in it as well. It seems to get very positive reviews.

mrk

[lbeachmike]

Also, are you saying that it's a problem to have multiple SATA controllers? I don't see why it should be - they are all independent entities, working off their independent controllers and are otherwise unrelated - similar to how any other type of storage device would be unrelated and have it's own controller. Or have I misunderstood your point?

[Midknyte]

PSU problems can be very subtle. Lockups during boot don't surprise me because everything is powering up when you first start up the computer. You might get random shutdowns or reboots.

Just multiple controllers in general can give you problems. Each card has its own firmware and bios. The motherboard has to manage all of these and the cards need to work with each other. Too many cooks spoil the soup.

There are NO SATA hdds that can sustain a 150MBps transfer rate. Physical limitations of the drive, such as spindle speed, limit most drives to 60-70MBps tops.