I have tested the following using sata.i kernel from the 10.2 CD, paired with two 320GB wd hard drives. I KNOW that SATA can work under Linux but I've been going at this for two weeks and I'm almost ready to trade the drives for IDE's.

Promise SATA-II150 TX2plus - mounts fine, installs fine, but when using it in the real world it causes data corruption. dmesg shows hundreds of read/write errors and e2fsck freezes the drive.

Silicon Image 3112 - Unable to boot from CD. Honestly I think the card may be a bootleg. I got it on eBay for cheap and the BIOS has grammar errors... anyways it freezes on the following lines:
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd blah blah
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd blah blah

I realize the 3112 was cheap, and the TX2plus isn't fully supported, so I was wondering if any of you guys have had success with a particular SATA controller.

I have Promise SATA-II150 TX2plus and Adaptec ASH-1205SA. Adaptec ASH-1205SA is based on Silicon Image 3112. And they both work fine in my server.

I have 4*SATA and 1*IDE drives connected to them and no read/write errors in 9 months or any other problems.
Server is on 24/7.

But I am using Slackware 10.1 if that makes any difference, propably not.

slackk

Using 3ware 9500S-4LP card on Gentoo with 2 Western Digital raptors in RAID0

This card has full Linux support there are drivers available from 3ware but I did'nt use them as the card was recognised and set up during the install

Link to 3ware here

Pete

Would you be able to tell me anything about your kernel that may be different than mine? Are you using any drivers from promise.com? Are you using sata.i, or a custom build?

I am using custom build kernel(2.6.13). I don't use any drivers from Promise.

I don't know how those cards behave under 2.4 kernel, because I have to use 2.6 kernel to get the PATA-port working.

I have tried 2.6.13.2 also. It was very slimmed down and I may not have enabled all that I should have. With the Promise TX2, I enabled:

[X] SCSI Disk
[X] SCSI Generic
[X] Promise TX2

It seemed to work well, but dmesg would continue to show read/write errors on certain areas of the disk, and e2fsck would fail.

It looks like you have hardware problems.

I didn't change the default config too much. I used Slackware's own 2.6.13 config file as a base config.
I only turned Promise TX2/TX4, Silicon Image, reiserfs and SMP on. Nothing else and its working very well.