Monday, May 7, 2007

Problems with Sil3114 RAID Card

I bought a generic 4 port SATA card (WD-3114) from eBay for the Maxtor Maxline Pro 500GB (the 7H500F0) SATA drive. I had run out of SATA connections on my Windows XP PC so I thought this would solve my problem. First mistake- I forgot to get extra SATA power Y splitter cables. In the back of my mind I thought all I needed were SATA cables which I had, but I had totally forgotten about the SATA power cable. So I temporarily disconnected the power from another SATA drive so I could at least setup this drive. I proceeded to upgrade the BIOS (5.3.14) & the drivers (1.5.10.0) of the Sil 3114 card. The problem is that in Windows the drive cannot be seen. Then I thought I made a mistake by not jumpering the drive to be SATA I only (default was SATA II 3.0Gs). Then I realized that the drive was connected to the third SATA port so I proceeded to connect it to Port 0 (the first port). But it was all in vain.

Then I went back to the Sil3114 driver page and noticed that there is a specific driver for non-raid hard disks/optical drive setups, and the version is 1.3.10.0- still no luck. Then I tried the combination of "legacy" BIOS (5.0.73) and drivers (1.0.15) and still no luck. Then I tried the combination of BIOS version 5.4.03 with version 1.3.10 drivers and that didn't work either. Finally I tried the 5.2.16 BIOS ("IDE") with the 1.3.10 non-raid drivers and still no go. As far as JBOD goes I couldn't find the option with any of the BIOS versions. Oh well- time to go with a non-RAID add-in card. Sheesh.

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