Sunsway/ST Lab PCI ATA133 2P SATA-PATA cards

Updated:  May 10th 2012

This is a PCI card that basically has two IDE ports. You can upgrade the BIOS on the card and get a Medley RAID controller feature, which will give you RAID modes 0,1 and 10.

While I was experimenting with some faulty hardware, power to one of the 4 disks in the RAID must have failed, and while the disk was not missing from the Set, per se, something had happened to it.

And lo and behold, their driver software delivers (Silicon Image Software). It rebuilt two disks that had problems. While the rebuild took place, Windows complained about a faulty hard disk presemt.

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Various stages during RAID rebuild

Good drivers !

RAID monster Redux

So the first build was a lot of work and shortcuts were made. Screws not fitted, no cable management, no extra cooling, etc.

The summer is coming and that means hotter indoor temperature. Better fit those extra fans now! It will surely extend the lifetime of both the disks and the computer.

I had a whole bunch of Akasa & Noctua voltage reducers to decrease the overall noise level of all the fans.

System seemd to average at around 26 degrees celsius according to Speccy. :D Room temperature is 25.1. So that's pretty decend. That machine runs 10 hardisks, a Phenom 960T, 4 GB of 1066Mhz RAM + 10 fans. It only runs a limited 64MB old Nvidia card at the moment. This rig draws about 197 watts, So the fitting of 10 fans increased the watt usage by about 10, even after ALL of then was fitted with voltage reducers.

Work in progres! 

80mm fan attached with softmounts, diagonally :)

Rear fans & PSU fan:

1. 2x80mm rear exhausts and a stock Phenom fan
2. 1x80mm internal intake
3. 1x80mm external intake

Front intakes: (Both covered with dust filters.)

1x120mm Akasa (SYSFAN)

1x80mm Somethingsomething (power siphoned from molex)

Cable managemnet done!

Custom fitted 120 and 80 mm fans blwing on the
side of the lower 6 disks trough chassis holes

Finished ! With a 8mm green led outtake in front of the CPU fan.

Old gaming rig rebuilt to RAID diskmonster!

So this is my main diskmonster rig:

•  MSI K9A2+ Mobo
• 460W PSU at the moment
• 4 Gb Kingston HyperX 1066
• Phenom II X4 960T
• GeForce 8800GT
• 2x SiL SATAPATA cards ( 320GB RAID 10,  120GB RAID 1, 640GB RAID 0)
• 1x WD 250GB IDE drive
• 1x Maxtor 40GB IDE for booting (Gonna move the user dirs soon, only 19 gigs free here!)
• Gbit ethernet
• 1TB IoMega USB external drive
• 2TB WD USB external drive
• About as many fans as I could fit in there.
• A total of 10 disks!

Notes about the PCI SiL0680 SATAPATA cards: These needs to be flashed with a downloadable BIOS to enable RAID modes. This is originally just a quad channel IDE controller. But with the flashing, you get RAID modes 0,1 and 10. This is one of those 'Medley' RAID cards and it seems they are even bootable but i can't confirm that yet.

Also the gfx card in the picture is not the 8800, it's out for de-dusting. That card is just an old 64MB PCIe2.0 Nvidia card i had lying around.

The rig in it's current state draws about 180 Watts of power.