VIA VT6421 SATA card does the job

So I had a nightmarish time getting the Silicon Image SIL3114 card to work with just one SATA drive. The opposite happened when I received the VIA VT6421 SATA card (2 SATA, 1 eSATA, & 1 IDE port), also purchased from eBay. After booting into XP and installing the latest drives from viaarena.com, the drive was immediately recognized and works. I guess the moral of the story is to avoid the SIL3114 and go with the VT6421 if you just want extra SATA ports and don't need RAID. The VT6421 card does RAID 0 and RAID 1, but I have absolutely no interest in testing those functionalities :-).

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.