Black Screen with SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card


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I am trying out the SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card.

So far no reviews on Newegg.com about this particular card.

The Sil3124 chipset is supported by unraid.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

One of the reasons I purchased this card, was because it was only 60.00 and had 4 sata ports.

 

It detects the drives fine but unraid just goes to a black screen after displaying some irq info.

If I pull out the drives it will boot up into unraid.

 

I updated the bios on the card and on my motherboard and still no luck.

 

Is anyone using this card in their system?

 

Thanks

 

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There is a review at Newegg now, about using the F4 function key to get to its config.  Perhaps that needs different settings.  In addition, for most of the similar Silicon Image cards, there is usually both a RAID and non-RAID BIOS for the card.  You might try a non-RAID BIOS.  You want all RAID stuff turned off.

 

Somewhere in someone's syslog, I believe I have seen a setup that looked like it must be using a SiI3124 chipset.  I can't say any better than that though.

 

(I hesitate to answer a post with your user name!  ;D  Not sure there is sufficient 'maturity' yet, to understand computers!  I'm sure there must be a story there, and part of me wants to know, but the rest of me is not sure I want to hear it!  I don't imagine there was a lot of competition for the name?!?)

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Well, I added this line

 

append initrd=bzroot rootdelay=10 acpi=off nolapic noapic vga=extended

 

 

and then tried just about all of the commands below and no luck.

My firmware is also the non-raid version.

 

Although I did see some crazy vertical lines on the screen. :)

 

Tried all the ones below except the last two.

 

    * nolapic

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

    * noapic

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

          o may be required for boards based on the nForce 5 or higher chipsets, until unRAID v4.4 final

    * acpi=off

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

    * acpi=force

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work (Asus P4SDX may need this)

    * irqpoll

          o wastes cpu cycles, but is sometimes needed for some motherboards

    * pci=routeirq

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

    * pci=noacpi

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

    * pci=nomsi

          o may be required to get some motherboards to work

    * swncq=0

          o only if needed, for boards based on the nForce 5 or higher chipsets, and possibly only for unRAID v4.4-beta2

    * vga=extended or vga=6

 

Might anyone have any other ideas?

 

Thanks for the help.

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The video is onboard.

 

The name comes from a lot of different stories.

 

I had an accident when I mixed a deadly combo at Hooters.

Whiskey and Hoooot Wings.

These two things don't go together!

 

I have a lot more stories and being lactose intolerance certainly never helped me out.

 

I borrowed the name from one of the naked gun movies.

I heard it and it made me laugh.

Most people get a laugh when I login to multiiplayer games and they see "Poopiepants".

 

Thanks for the assistance!

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Continued from other threads.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4305.msg39752#msg39752

 

Re: PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

 

 

 

 

eBay has a PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

 

The documentation says PCI-e X1, physically looks like a PCI-e x1 interface. Says it provides 4 lanes of SATA300 inc PM support.

So in theory you could have 20 HDDs but they would share one 250MB/s channel. However a couple of these cards and two PMs would give you 16 drives at reasonable cost and fairly good performance, especially if you have four or more onboard sata ports. 

 

Looks like a good card for those with PCI-e X1 slots to fill or as a replacement for a SIL3132 giving four sata ports as oppossed to two.

 

All my SATA parts report as UDMA100 under PCI (SIL3112, 3114 and 3124).

With my PCI SIL3124 I get lots of noise in the syslog when attaching HDDs via PM. Seem to work fine though. Marginal performance hit using PM when running parity.

 

I dont have any PCI-e motherboards for testing as yet. Will report back when they arrive.

 

Rgds

 

Kevin

 

Newegg  has this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

I think there has been a couple people try it in the unRAID server without success. Hopefully someone will get it to work.

 

I got mine yesterday.  It had an older RAID bios in it, so I flashed it to the newest standard bios.

 

However, it does not work in unRAID.  It initializes ok and sees drives in the bios, but when unRaid starts detecting and initializing the devices it stops and locks up at this card with IRQ errors, FF.  I don't recall the entire sequence and I haven't done further testing on it yet.  Since this is the first time a sil3124 has been built utilizing a PCI-e X1 slot, it could be a driver issue, but that's just a guess.

 

--Bill

 

 

Can you go into the bios of the card and disable the raid bios? I have to do this with my Adaptec 1430SA cards.

 

Please continue the discussion of this board and it's use in unRAID here.

 

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Continued from other threads.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4305.msg39752#msg39752

 

Re: PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

 

 

 

 

eBay has a PCI-e bridged SIL3124.  (item # 280391868133)

 

The documentation says PCI-e X1, physically looks like a PCI-e x1 interface. Says it provides 4 lanes of SATA300 inc PM support.

So in theory you could have 20 HDDs but they would share one 250MB/s channel. However a couple of these cards and two PMs would give you 16 drives at reasonable cost and fairly good performance, especially if you have four or more onboard sata ports.   

 

Looks like a good card for those with PCI-e X1 slots to fill or as a replacement for a SIL3132 giving four sata ports as oppossed to two.

 

All my SATA parts report as UDMA100 under PCI (SIL3112, 3114 and 3124).

With my PCI SIL3124 I get lots of noise in the syslog when attaching HDDs via PM. Seem to work fine though. Marginal performance hit using PM when running parity.

 

I dont have any PCI-e motherboards for testing as yet. Will report back when they arrive.

 

Rgds

 

Kevin

 

Newegg  has this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

I think there has been a couple people try it in the unRAID server without success. Hopefully someone will get it to work.

 

I got mine yesterday.  It had an older RAID bios in it, so I flashed it to the newest standard bios.

 

However, it does not work in unRAID.  It initializes ok and sees drives in the bios, but when unRaid starts detecting and initializing the devices it stops and locks up at this card with IRQ errors, FF.  I don't recall the entire sequence and I haven't done further testing on it yet.  Since this is the first time a sil3124 has been built utilizing a PCI-e X1 slot, it could be a driver issue, but that's just a guess.

 

--Bill

 

 

Can you go into the bios of the card and disable the raid bios? I have to do this with my Adaptec 1430SA cards.

 

Please continue the discussion of this board and it's use in unRAID here.

 

 

Will do.

 

When I reflashed the bios, I used the standard (not RAID) version.  So yes, I disabled it.  :-)

 

I just finished setting up a full development machine w/Slackware 13 and the huge kernel  The boot drive is e-SATA which can be moved from that machine and booted on my unRaid box for comparative motherboard vs cards tests.  I'll test this card later tonight on the dev machine to a) see if the behavior is any different in 2.6.29.1 vs .6, and b) note what the exact errors are.  I'll post here and see if anyone recognizes them.

 

--Bill

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

Ide, Parallel, Serial, Sound All Disabled already.

I have tried it on another machine and it works fine.

I can flash it, do whatever.

 

This machine has two different types of sata 2 port cards and they work fine.

I have tried with only the sil inside of the machine and no luck.

I think it may be a driver issue with this syba.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

FWIW - I ran into this problem as well using these cards with Unraid 4.5 (release).  I was upgrading the MB and controllers because I was sick of the I/O limits of using the 8 port promise PCI SATA controller cards.  The MB was a GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P, and the controllers were the SYBA SY-PEX40008 4 port, 1x PCIe cards.  I currently have 14 drives, so 8 ports on the MB plus 8 from the 2 controllers covers me.

 

I had similar hang problems as those described on this thread.  The BIOS in the cards could always recognize the drives, but if you had any drive connected to one of the SYBA cards, linux would hang as soon as the Sil3124 driver touched the physical disk.  The drive active light would come on and the entire system would become unresponsive.

 

I tried

+ Switching to the base (non-raid) bios; no help.

+ Booting with and without dives connected to the 2 different MB controllers, and no drives connected to the SYBA cards; no problems at all.

+ Booting with and without dives connected to the 2 different MB controllers, and 1 or more drives connected to each of the SYBA controllers; always hangs on the first disk recognized by the kernel driver.

+ Moving the cards to the different 1x PCIe slots, running with both or only one.  Any time a drive was connected, it hung, otherwise no problems.

 

SYBA BIOS always recognized any drive I attached, new or old, raid bios or non-raid.

 

Finally, I stuck a disk with windows on it and booted; windows seemed to be OK with the syba controllers; once I finally managed to convince it to install the drivers (more of a PITA than it should be ideally).

 

In the end, my conclusion was driver trouble in the current version of the kernel build, so I returned the cards to newegg.

 

There is a bright side to the story, however.  Looking for replacements, I found the Adaptec 2241000-R; which newegg had available as an open box special for only $6 more than the SYBA cards.  Even better they are PCIe 4x.  Even better still, they work in the GB mobo, which apparently has trouble with PCIe 1x cards in its PCIe 16x slots (which GB claims are for video only; see discussion here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3739.0)

 

Cards seem to be good.  IO bottlenecks are a thing of the past; 10.5 TB usable storage and 60MB/s parity checks instead of 10, I'm happy :)

 

 

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