[plug] SATA SiI - Seagate problems

[Steve Baker]

Hi PLUGgers,

I bought a PCI SATA adapter card and a SATA drive last week, blissfully 
unaware the there were compatibility issues with Silicon Image chipset 
and some Seagate drives.  I installed it and all was recognised 
properly, but there were some problems.  Short bursts of activity were 
fine, but sustained transfers cause the drive to hang.  After some 
research I decided to add the drive model to the sata_sil blacklist, 
recompiled the module and it seemed to work.  After a couple of days the 
same errors started to occur again.  After more research, I discovered 
that the problem had apparently been fixed by Seagate in later model 
drives and also SiI had updated their drivers to fix some related 
issues.  I downloaded and flashed the most recent SiI BIOS (v4.2.76) for 
the PCI adaptor but now the systems hangs at boot time when trying to 
enumerate the drives attached to the adapter.  D'oh.

Has anyone experienced this problem, or similar?  I'm currently running 
kernel 2.6.12.  I downloaded 2.6.15 but haven't compiled it yet - is it 
worth it?  Have there been any changes to the libata or sata_sil drivers 
from 2.6.12-> 15?  Any other suggestions?

Thanks.
Steve