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 
