I used Silicon Image sil3132 controller for quite some time as a part of md RAID made of 750G disks and had no problems whatsoever, but recently I tried to attach a 2T Hitachi 7K2000 disk to it with astonishing results: after each reboot first 32k of the disk are overwritten with zeroes - physical overwrite verified by attaching disk to one of the motherboard sata channels. I had another controller handy - different manufacturer and no RAID BIOS, but the same sil3132 chip, tried replacing but got the same result. sata_sil24 misbehaving or what?

ubuntu 8.04, 2.6.24-28-generic #1 SMP Wed Nov 24 09:00:20 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux