Hi, I had similar problems with a SiI3512A card some time ago, and ended up using just the internal ports.
Since I had some time today, I installed i386/mp-current on a spare computer and tested with two SATA disks. Writing 300GB of zeros (dd) in parallel to both disks showed no error. So I assume they stability of the 3512 depends on other factors (mainboard, IRQs, moon phase...). I also tested two other cards: 1) VIA VT6421 This chipset is not listed in "man pciide", but a quick "grep" showed that it's mentioned in the code. The system froze during boot after detecting the first disk, no matter if one or two disks were attached. pciide1 at pci2 dev 4 function 0 "VIA VT6421 SATA" rev 0x50: DMA pciide1: using apic 1 int 20 for native-PCI interrupt wd0 at pciide1 channel 0 drive 0: <WDC WD5000AAKS-65YGA0> wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 476940MB, 976773168 sectors wd0(pciide1:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 2) jmb0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "JMicron JMB363 IDE/SATA" rev 0x03 Worked nicely. According to systat it provided around 30MB/sec write speed, whereas the SiI3512A only had around 20MB/sec. kind regards, Robert
