Chieftec SATA Backplane: Stay away

[Arno Wagner]

I am talking about these here: http://tinyurl.com/5trvx
They are also available in white and also seem to be sold
unbranded.

I had serious problems with them under Linux, other
operating systems may be affected as well.

I got numerous hard and permanent kernel freezes with a Promise 150
TX4 on disks in the third slot from the top when resyncing a RAID5 on
them. (Observed with two different backplanes.) The signal lines on
this slot (and possibly to a lesser degree on the other ones) seem to
have a misalignment problem, possibly due to long signal lines on
the PCB and imprecise manufacturing. The misalignment leads to command
timeouts on the SATA data bus. This can habben within seconds
of disk access, but I also had one case were no problem happened for
several hours of intensive disk access.

This was with Kernels up to 2.6.9-rc2 (newest at the time of test)
which cannot handle the resulting problem gracefully and freeze after
a short error message. The disks were 8 Maxtor 6Y250M0.

See bug 3418 (http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3418)
on the kernel bugzilla for the whole adventure I had before
I finally identified the problem.

Side note: The cooling is also not very good. The disks are hot,
even in an air-conditioned server room and with little disk
activity.

Arno

 

[petar_b]

Chieftec Back Plane

Back-Plane Aluminum Mobile Rackby Chieftec is working for me just fine. I tested it on windows (xp, server 2003 32 and 64). Controller is Silicon Image. It's working in Chieftec server case, 24/7 for almost 2 year on a File Serving machine. Curently inside are Samsungs and IBM HDs, of 400 and/or 500MB. Heat discipation is just fine, drives are not hot at all. Before that I had seagates inside 100 and 200 GB. No drive ever died. I have never had any problem at all. I have few of them, as the spare parts or for extra drawers.

I can combine drawers with other 1x or 3x or 4x docks. I dont know if this is really chieftect hardware or someone elses, as I find it on the web without chieftec labels, but all seems to be compatible and works well.

I have read reviews of IcyDock and I don't see any reason why one should get IcyDock, as chieftec has better cooling, more aluminum... and drive is more protected.

 

[Gomezz]

I have to Agree with Petar. I have 4, 2 have 250Gb HDD and 2 with 4 500GB & 2 1.5 TB drives. I have not had a problem just had to change out the noisy fans. Over all Got them on the Cheap from ebay and well pleased with the results. I am using a LSI SER523 REV and a INTEL SRCS16 Sata raid card both are Silicon Image compliant My 3ware 9500 would not work with the Back plane. Over all for the money I would jump on another deal concerning this back plane.