Syba SD-PCBX-ESA2 ExpressCard SIL3132 - HDD does not show up on FreeNAS

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I can't seem to get this card to show any drives on my cousin's laptop FreeNAS build. I have the card in his expresscard slot, and an esata to sata cable going to an externally powered harddrive.
I tried windows xp on the laptop and a connected harddrive showed up just fine.
In FreeNAS pciconf -lv shows

Code:

siis0@pci0:2:0:0:       class=0x018000 card=0x31321095 chip=0x31321095 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Silicon Image Inc (Was: CMD Technology Inc)'
    device     = 'PCI Express (1x) to 2 Port SATA300 (SiI 3132)'
    class      = mass storage

But nothing shows up under 'View Disks' in FreeNAS's webgui.

I tried flashing the IDE(non-RAID) bios under FreeDOS, it hanged. Tried it under dos, it went a bit further and hanged. Tried flashing it in Windows XP, the flash command goes through but even after a reboot bios verison and always shows as UNKNOWN. I believe this card doesn't actaully accept new bioses and has a IDE(non-RAID) bios to begin with. (It gave direct disk access to windows XP I believe)
I read somewhere 64bit FreeNAS might have better drivers for this card but that is not an option because his laptop only supports 32bit.

I would love some help getting disk to show up, even plugging/unplugging the card doesn't show anything in dmesg. Thanks!

---

EDIT
dmesg | grep siis gives

Code:

siis0: <SiI3132 SATA controller> port 0xa000-0xa07f irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci2
siis0: 0x80 bytes of rid 0x10 res 3 failed (0, 0xffffffff).
device_attach: siis0 attach returned 6

 

[StephenFry]

I'm almost sure it's a driver problem.

The SiI chipset is fine, it has proven itself in many builds. Even if you had it still configured with a RAID BIOS, the 3132 uses a fakeraid that would not prevent FreeNAS from seeing the drives. It would only cause problems once you got to filling up the drives, as it writes one 512b/4K sector of metadata on each drive.

As far as I'm concerned, any PCMCIA card is "exotic hardware", which I've learned to avoid with FreeBSD/NAS...

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I'm almost sure it's a driver problem.

The SiI chipset is fine, it has proven itself in many builds. Even if you had it still configured with a RAID BIOS, the 3132 uses a fakeraid that would not prevent FreeNAS from seeing the drives. It would only cause problems once you got to filling up the drives, as it writes one 512b/4K sector of metadata on each drive.

As far as I'm concerned, any PCMCIA card is "exotic hardware", which I've learned to avoid with FreeBSD/NAS...

Yeah, testing FreeBSD 9 now to see if the drives show up.
Also I wouldn't normally choose this route, but my cousin wanted to build a NAS for as cheap as possible with his hold laptop and his old 3.5inch harddrive. All it has is a expresscardslot and I don't want to go usb...

 

[cyberjock]

I'm almost sure it's a driver problem.

The SiI chipset is fine, it has proven itself in many builds. Even if you had it still configured with a RAID BIOS, the 3132 uses a fakeraid that would not prevent FreeNAS from seeing the drives. It would only cause problems once you got to filling up the drives, as it writes one 512b/4K sector of metadata on each drive.

As far as I'm concerned, any PCMCIA card is "exotic hardware", which I've learned to avoid with FreeBSD/NAS...

+1 for avoiding ExpressCards(but PCMCIAs suck too). I bought an esata controller for my laptop a year or two ago too. I was told I could use it to boot from an external drive. I was hoping to use my external SSD to install Linux to get familiar with it. After several days I found out that apparently Expresscards cannot be used as bootable devices because of the way they are expressed to the system. While you aren't attempting to boot from the expresscard, the expression of the card on the system may be the reason why its not working.

Have you tried using FreeBSD 9 to see if it works there? If it does at least you could try to identify why it doesn't on whatever version you are currently using.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Yeah, tried FreeBSD 9. Still no extra devices in /dev show up...
dmesg | grep siis
shows that to ata ports are created and there are no errors.. not sure where to go from here. Found someone who had a similar problem with the expresscard version of the Sil3132 on FreeBSD 8 but it was never resolved.

I'm gonna try ubuntu and see if drives show up there...

 

[mav@]

I don't think it is siis(4) driver problem. It looks like resource allocation problem by the ACPI or PCI code. You may try to contact John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> for any hints.