On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 07:43  PM, Caffeinate The World wrote:

> - SIIG Serial ATA PCI does use the 3112A chip. Price
>   ranges from $38-$50.

This is good to know.  Do you happen to have the model number of this 
board?

> - SATA is still "fresh" from the factory. So don't
>   expect to run production servers on it.

I think you can safely run production servers on it.  Certainly, once 
you've worked around the errata for your various controller/drive 
combination, then it seems to work pretty well :-)  Seriously, though, 
I have had pretty good luck with Maxtor and Western Digital drives with 
the Silicon Image part.  Seagate also works, but there is a potential 
errata that needs to be worked around with Seagate drives with the 
Silicon Image part, and I don't have an exhaustive list of the drives 
which need it (but working around it is simple if the drive has it).

> - Performance tests on Windows machine place SATA/150
>   only slightly above ATA/100. See:
>   http://www.envynews.com/review.php?ID=379&page=1

This is not really much of a surprise.  You're still limited by how 
fast you can slurp the data off the platter.  Just because the 
interface is clocked faster doesn't mean that the platter spins faster 
:-)

> - SATA does offer hotswappable feature. Theoretically.
>   I've not seen any tests or hotswap trays offering
>   this feature.

Well... Hot swap is not an afterthought in S-ATA.  So, you don't really 
need special "tray" support for it.  Basically, if you plug in a disk, 
or unplug a disk, the controller notices a PHY link change event.  This 
interrupt can be ignored, or the driver can un-ignore it and do 
something useful with it.

         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>