Chieftec (also unbranded) 3-in-2 SATA Hotswap Backplane

Manufacturer: Chieftec / unbranded

Model number: SNT-2131SATA / e.g. ”SATA Backplane 3-HDD”

Description:

• Available in Black or beige
• All aluminium design with conductive dissipation grooves
• 2 Bay for 3 HDDs
• 15 pin SATA power & 4 pin power
• 8 cm fan - super air ventilation & heat sink
• Power control, sensor & alarm
• Plug & play
• Support hot swap & RAID 0,1,5
• Dimensions: 202 x 146 x 86 mm PCI id:

Reason (no specs from manufacturer, really new hardware, etc):

• Setup: Promise SATA150 TX4, Maxtor 6Y250M0

• On two out of two I tried, the SATA data lines on the PCB where misaligned enough that with several quality SATA cables the disk produced command timeouts. With other cables it worked. I suspect far too large manufacturing tolerances, since the SATA spec does allow only 1 ps (picosecond!) difference in between the signal pairs in the connectors. The backplane counts as a connector here.

• The problem is that Linux (up to 2.6.9-rc2, current version when I had this problem) the kernel freezes hard and permanently on this error.

I did many tests, maybe 50 with freezes (10 seconds…several hours), always on the disk in the third slot from the top, except one single freeze in the second from top.

Functionality (from 0 to 100% of full functionality): 0%, unusable

Bugzilla # for kernel bugs database: 3418

Contact (your email): arno.wagner@acm.org

Notes:

• The cooling functionality is not good too: The disks get almost too hot to touch in an air-conditioned server room (20C) and with litle disk activity.
• This thing is broken by design in my opinion.

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