I grabbed this card from my local computer shop without doing any research. I was very excited and eager to get my home NAS up and running. I was soon disappointed after installing and configuring one hard drive. I was using freeNas then and the write speeds where terribly slow. This was one of the main reasons why I started looking for another NAS solution other than freeNAS.
When I migrated to OpenMediaVault this card seemed to have much better Linux support. The I/O speeds were very decent and in spite of this this card always seemed unstable and even though I kept having unstable behavior with hard drives I never made the connection that this card was the root cause. If I had any clue that this was the case I perhaps would not have been so eager with my move to RAID and would have delayed my migration until after I had found a reliable replacement. Alas, you lose data to learn and I lost over 500GB worth of movies and tv shows.
I am at the point now where I want to toss this card! This time I want to make sure I get a pretty decent card, without breaking the bank, so I am making sure I do my research. I’ll most likely have to order one online because I am pretty sure I will not be able to get a decent one locally for a reasonable price and I hate overpaying.
Until then I thought why not upgrade the card’s firmware. I was stumbling across the web when I came across the fact that you can Flash the card with the IDE BIOS version of the firmware which removes all the RAID functionality. I don’t need the RAID features on this card as I will be using software RAID. This flash will also be the latest BIOS version. I had thought for some reason that the IDE BIOS was ment for cards with IDE connectors but it seems I was wrong about this. I have nothing to lose so I downloaded the firmware and the windows update tool. I’ll be updating the firmware from a winpe usb boot disk. Let’s see how this one works out.
For my future reference when I forget:
1. SIL3114 4/22/2008 – 5.5.0.0
2. Windows Flash tool
Guru Dude 
Im sorry but of every website I’ve ever been to the lat one is nearly impossible for me to navigate. for one thing all hyperlinks (like the one you have above) just click onto a generic page not on the page with the driver. I can’t find the bios file anywhere on the website all I seen to get are more and more questions and answers about it but no stinking file.