Dieter wrote:
>>> The Silicon Image 3112 (two port) and 3114 (four port) cards are
>>> supported.
> 
>> Watch out for that chipset...it has some significant hardware
>> problems which affect large data transfers and can result in data
>> corruption unless certain workarounds are implemented.  These
>> workarounds reduce performance...
> 
> I have the 3512 (2 port).  Max throughput is limited to ~40 MB/s, but no
> data corruption or other problems.  I don't notice the throughput limit
> in "normal" use.  Your milage may vary.

That seems to match my experience and what I've heard from others-- bare drive 
performance is OK but not outstanding...but if you try using a 4-port variant, 
in something like a RAID-10 config, you'll probably feel a bit disappointed by 
the performance you get.

If someone isn't doing RAID, and just wants to hook up a single drive or maybe 
two, it's probably not a significant concern to get one of the later model 
Silicon Image cards.  The bigger issue is getting support for the latest PCIe 
or integrated variants.

>> the SilI 3124 or later chipsets are  better, but not great.
> 
> I've been told that the 3124 is good.  What's wrong with it?

I don't think there is anything wrong with the 3124 or 3132 chips-- I've got a 
MSI-7220 MB in one machine and I didn't see a significant performance 
difference between the chipset's "nForce4 SLI x16 MCP" based SATA and the 
extra SiliconI 3132 2-port SATA under Windows against a single 250GB SATA-2 
drive.  The CPU load seemed to be higher when using the SilI 3132.

I don't have comparable numbers under a BSD system, as I believe there is a 
driver but it is proprietary...?

> Does NetBSD support it?

I am not entirely sure; about 2-3 months ago, someone wrote:

> In message <20051219105220.GA24011@vaasje.org>, Frank van der Linden writes:
> [ ... ]
>>Having written an SiI3124 driver for NetBSD (which won't be open-sourced as
>>far as I know) in my previous job, I can tell you that the SiI3124 interface
>>and the AHCI interface are different.

Perhaps you might want to ask Wasabi systems about this...?

-- 
-Chuck