promise sata card for IC7-G

Hello,

I've already had insurmountable trouble with the
SiI 3112 controller and the Plextor px-712a SATA DVD writer.
It plays and reads both DVD and CD-R fine, but all attempts
at burning fail.

New problems with Maxtor SATA HD
---------------------------------------
Now I've been testing a Maxtor 6B300S0 Diamond 10
hard drive, also on SATA4. My HDTach tests went fine
(avg read 53 MB/s), and I was able to copy a 17 GB folder to it.
However I tried doing a read/write via a WinRAR extraction
and I got a flood of paging errors, then lockups, and finally
the drive was automatically unsafely removed. At that point
it disappeared from Explorer, but returned OK after reboot.

What about using a Promise SATA PCI card? I'm looking at
the TX4plus ($60), with 4 ports. With overclocking I locked
the PCI bus at 33MHz. Will I be able to take advantage of the
66 MHz ability of the Promise card if I turn off the OC?

I use the Intel ICH5R to Raid0 2 Raptor 74 GB drives. This
is the backbone of my new system, and it works flawlessly with
almost unbelievable benchmarks (avg read 135 MB/s via HDTach).

Will I be able to move the Maxtor SATA drive to a Promise PCI card
and get reliable read/writes?

tia,
tlviewer

 

Did you try the updated drivers available from Silicon Image?

Again the updated drivers would be interesting, as I've found that SI's
latest SiI3114 drivers cured a large file copy problem on the IC7 Max3, so
there are fixes to be had. However, it should go without saying that errors
of this sort can often be a result of a not-100%-stable overclock, so if
this applies make sure you've tried the system at default speeds in order to
be certain of the cause of the problem.

No. The PCI bus won't run at 66MHz even in the absence of other issues, so
it's a moot point. More significant though is the fact that S-ATA
controllers in general, and the Intel onchip one in particular, are
extremely intolerant of non-standard bus frequencies, so it's likely that
your boot array will become inaccessible

That's a crystal ball question. I've never been a fan of random hardware
swaps like this in an attempt to solve problems. It's totally unscientific,
and may always cause issues of its own, leaving you even more confused.

What did Windows' Event Viewer have to say about the problems you were
experiencing?
--


Richard Hopkins
Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
(replace .nospam with .com in reply address)

The UK's leading technology reseller www.dabs.com

 

can't comment on the Promise card but I do know that if you unlock the
PCI/AGP busses, the Intel SATA controller will likely disappear as it does
not seem to tolerate any overclock of the PCI bus.

--

Thomas Geery
Network+ certified

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ftp://68.98.180.8 Abit Mirror <----- Cable modem IP
This IP is dynamic so it *could* change!...
over 130,000 FTP users served!
^^^^^^^

 

This card is the TX4 (no plus). The plus variant supports RAID, mine
does not -- I knew this in advance. If I get another 6B300S0, I could
use the 3112 for RAID.

Running both the px-712a (SATA) and the Maxtor 6B300S0 won't work
on either the TX4 or the 3112. I've read other warnings about mixing
fast and legacy devices on a controller, but now I believe it after
trying it -- all audio was cracking, popping, and freezing.

So far, I can't get the TX4 to recognize the px-712a by itself -- it says
Bios failed to load.

The best configuration to date is px-712a on the 3112 and the
Maxtor SATA on the TX4.

I imagine that the 3112 would handle the Maxtor if it was
dedicated (without the legacy optical drive), but I havn't tried
it yet.

The 3112 controller is impressive since it allows configuration
in the Bios and it has a supporting System tray utility that allows
some control over advanced properties like write caching. The
TX4 lacked both of these abilities.

Over all, the IC7-G is awesome. The only problems I've had
are due to my own inexperience, especially with choosing hardware.

regards,
tlviewer