Specification
Product Details
- Brand: SIIG
- Model: SC-SA0E12-S1
- Format: CD-ROM
- Original language:
English - Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 2.00" h x
7.00" w x
9.00" l,
.66 pounds
Features
- SIIG SC-SA0E12-S1 DP SATA 6GB/S 2S1P PCIE
Product Description
SIIG DP SATA 2S1P PCIe - Storage controller - IDE / SATA-600 - 600 MBps - PCI Express 2.0 x1
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
By M. C. Heck
I have about twenty years of technology experience, and about forty hours of it have gone into troubleshooting this particular festering pile of dog snot. Let me take you through a few highlights.This product is an excellent example of why you always want to check four things before you buy computer hardware:1. Did the card manufacturer make the silicon/firmware?2. Are people experiencing problems, regardless of what operating system they're using?3. Who provides driver updates? Do they work with my operating system?4. Who provides firmware updates? Do they work with my operating system?Let's go through these as they apply to this card in particular.#1. Did the card manufacturer make the silicon/firmware?Definitely not. That's not immediately a bad thing, but there are some reasons it's bad here. This product is a thin SIIG build around a Marvell 88SE9128 SATA3 interface and a small EEPROM (which holds a bootloader, some BIOS code, the main firmware, and possibly some configuration information). In fact, there is almost nothing else on the card except the physical interface ports, some LED headers, and some passives. That's it. So, clearly, SIIG has designed the packaging, and not much else.#2. Are people experiencing problems, regardless of what operating system they're using?Oh, hell yes. Severity is all over the map-- under Windows, people are mostly complaining about performance issues, specifically with SSDs. That can be tricky to troubleshoot, though, because SSDs have their own firmware issues. Under Linux, though, the problems are more severe. You'll find a lot more specific details and a very thorough discussion about those, because there are some very verbose debugging facilities in the kernel these days, and people have taken a good, hard look at this thing.What they are seeing is drives that, when ordered to perform extensive SMART self-tests (and this problem is almost the poster-child for why the drives are supposed to conduct those tests WITHOUT controller oversight), test out fine-- but after a few megabytes of transfers through this piece of work, they start to hang. The basic problem seems to be that the physical link keeps going up and down. This is a serious problem that you normally associate with a bad power supply, but in this case it's because the card is reporting bogus CHS information, and the kernel can't figure out what the hell else to do, so it resets the link to try and reinitialize things. Nobody knows why the information is bogus, but I strongly suspect the transceiver silicon, because this chip has been embedded into a few motherboards (with different passive/termination designs), and people are reporting lots of problems there, too.In my professional opinion, the poor performance people are seeing from this product under Windows is because those same errors are happening there as well, and being masked by the driver. There is some evidence to support this, but it's all closed-source so it's hard to know for sure without wiretapping the SATA link (which can be done). Obviously, that's less severe than flat-out failing, but it sure doesn't inspire much confidence.#3. Who provides driver updates? Do they work with my operating system?First, if you are using Linux, you should know that the Marvell chip in question has already royally pissed off the driver team that attempted to implement support for it. At one point, it basically didn't work at all; the "fix" in a particular patch was to blacklist Native Command Queueing (NCQ)-- with obvious performance impacts. Honestly, I'm not clear on whether that worked or not.If you are using Windows, you can obtain drivers from SIIG by searching for "SC-SA0E12-S1" on their site. There are exactly two files: a completely bare driver with no installer whatsoever, and a "RAID Manager" that-- I am not making this up-- opens a _web page_ to manage the RAID controller, and requires-- I am still not making this up-- that you ENTER YOUR WINDOWS LOGON PASSWORD IN THE WEB PAGE to view it. I don't even want to think about the level of security malfeasance and design ineptitude that lead to requiring that, so, let's not.In any case, the driver archive contains a bunch of different 32 and 64-bit drivers, with absolutely no installer whatever. Expect to have to go into the Device Manager and manually upgrade and install things, piece by piece.#4. Who provides firmware updates? Do they work with my operating system?Well, because Marvell did the silicon, Marvell provides the firmware.To, uh, somebody.Somewhere.I presume.They sure as hell don't provide them to YOU, End User-- search for "88SE9128" on Marvell's web site and all you'll get is a press release. You're supposed to go bug SIIG, since they built the card. If you've ever tried to get upgraded graphics drivers for the "mobile" version of a graphics card in your laptop, and gotten the runaround from nVidia or ATI, you have an idea what the situation is. So, that leaves you with SIIG.Buried in that driver archive are two console applications. One of them is a RAID management app that is actually more or less what you would hope. The other is a FLASH utility to replace all the firmware. This is a _16-BIT DOS APPLICATION_, which _WILL NOT RUN_ on a 64-bit Windows system. Or, obviously, a Linux system. What most people these days are going to have to do is make a bootable USB stick with a _Windows 98 boot image_ on it (still not making this up). That isn't completely unheard of for firmware updates but it is a HUGE pain in the ass if you're not already set up to do it.So then the big question is: is there a newer version of the firmware? Where do I get it?Well, fear not. It turns out there is newer firmware-- on some weird hacker site in France. It is CLEARLY material that started life being forwarded from Marvell to an OEM, and it includes useful utilities for flashing the card (some of which appear to actually be _older_ than the SIIG driver). The firmware version is substantially "newer"-- but in my case, it didn't fix any problems, it just made the BIOS menu ("Press CTRL-M") go away. Oops. So, be careful if you decide to mess around with THAT stuff; I'm pretty sure it was intended for a version integrated into a motherboard. You might try upgrading _only_ the firmware and not the BIOS, and mixing and matching materials between the leaked version and the stuff buried in the SIIG driver-- but you'd better be a pretty serious hardware hacker.I've had two of these damned things for months now, trying to get one or the other of them to run a pair of Western Digital Raptors on either of two different motherboards (an Asus and a Gigabyte, both recent). I have completely given up. I can't even get it to reliably run the freaking DVD drive. They weren't cheap, either, which is seriously ticking me off.Furthermore, when configured as an actual RAID controller, you can't check the SMART status of the drives connected to it. As a result, I just use it as a passthrough SATA3 controller, and do software RAID, so that I can use smartmontools to check the drives. It ticks me off that this is necessary; even the Intel Matrix Storage Manager doesn't rule that out.RAID controllers are expensive, so solutions abound-- thousand dollar cards, software RAID solutions, and motherboard solutions.Whatever you do, don't use this piece of junk-- or anything else based on that Marvell chip. Or, in my opinion after using this thing, ANY Marvell chip. Consider Intel, LSI, whoever-- but watch out for RocketRAID cards built on the same problem chip (they have alternate designs; use those).
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
By HUIYPAERBOWLOW
This thing is the finest thing ever. The Serial ATA is very well for my set. I can run my Chinese panel through it. I can run my pata read only DVD drive. One of the parameters for a new set was running it. I was going to have to do with out now things are fine. The thing is excellent.
SIIGs SATA PCIe host controller, the DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe, is designed to add two Serial ATA and one Parallel ATA channels for connecting up to 2 SATA and 2 ...
Amazon.com: Dp Sata 6GB/S 2S1P Pcie: Electronics
SIIG DP SATA 2S1P PCIe - Storage controller - IDE / SATA-600 - 600 MBps - PCI Express 2.0 x1 What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? SIIG DP SATA ...
DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe - SIIG Home Page
SIIGs SATA PCIe host controller, the DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe, is designed to add two Serial ATA and one Parallel ATA channels for connecting up to 2 SATA and 2 ...
Answer : Question on siig sata 3 controller
Question on siig sata 3 controller - answer - Does anyone know the status of the SIIG DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe (Part number: SC-SA0E12-S1)? I am encountering problems ...
Siig DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe Adapter SC-SA0E12-S1 PCI Express ...
The Siig SC-SA0E12-S1 Controller Card, include DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe adapter, Spare low profile bracket, Serial ATA cable, Dual-connector Serial ATA power cable and ...
Siig SIIG CONTROLLER CARD SC-SA0E12-S1 DP SATA 6GB S 2S1P PCIE ...
Siig SIIG CONTROLLER CARD SC-SA0E12-S1 DP SATA 6GB S 2S1P PCIE RETAIL - SC-SA0E12-S1 - Item #620213 at pcRUSH.com with best price for only $43.70 as of Saturday ...
Question on siig sata 3 controller | Linux | Kernel
Question on siig sata 3 controller Linux Kernel ... Does anyone know the status of the SIIG DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe (Part number: SC-SA0E12-S1)?
sata 6gb pcie - ShopWiki
ShopWiki has 103 results for sata 6gb pcie, including DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe, DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe, ATTO ExpressSAS R608 8-Port Internal 6Gb/s SAS/SATA PCIe 2.0 ...
SIIG DP SATA 2S1P PCIe - storage controller - IDE / SATA-600 - PCI ...
More product information: User reviews Specifications Manufacturer info Description: PCI-Express (PCIe) x1 board with two SATA 6Gb/s and one Parallel ATA channels ...
Mailing List Archive: Question on siig sata 3 controller
Does anyone know the status of the SIIG DP SATA 6Gb/s 2S1P PCIe (Part number: SC-SA0E12-S1)? I am encountering problems writing a large quantity through this
Powered by Azon XML Builder (AXB)
{ 0 comments... read them below or add one }
Post a Comment