Like so many before me, I wanted to add more drives in the WHS system. So far I have been using the XFX Revo64 in JBOD mode, however I have recently started doubting this small but powerful card- for one, RAID eats up at your drives MTBF as it tries to check HDD stability over a set interval, it also check the drives while in JBOD and finally it just reported two drives as failed which upon moving them to my main system and checked with manufacturer diagnostic tool proved to be 100% healthy.

Hence I have decided to go for an extremely plain SATA controller in the form of a SI3114 controller providing 4 SATA ports. In my naivete I believed that since this is a very simple piece of kit it would be a simple matter to install and extend my SATA drive capacity. The hubris…

The problems I encountered were in the following order:

1) Card needs drivers, drivers in the CD were not compatible, none of them, tried them all.

2) Downloaded drivers from a generic driver site that had served me well. They did not work.

3) Tried to find the Silicon Image drivers from the company’s site. I could not find them for one minute of looking so I gave up.

From that point on I tried other things, looked for a new system to house my WHS with a focus on multiple SATA ports in the MB, found some promising options too. However my budget was not up to par on this purchase, so I tucked it away for later. Meanwhile, I started checking the “failed” disks on my main system and found them healthy.
A little frustration always helps to make one more determined. So I went back to the SI3114 controller and started doing all kinds of things that made no sense until by luck I found a post that described where the drivers are downloaded from the Silicon Image website.

You see, the support page has a huge area devoted to different areas of interest and on the very bottom there is one little drop box to pick a product. I missed that, mea culpa.

With the drivers being so many I started checking online for other SI3114 users, most offering systems working with the non-raid driver. Got that, installed it and it worked… until the next reboot that is. System froze at a prompt that said Press CTRL + S or F4 to enter the RAID utility. More research online and I saw this was a common problem amongst users of this card. In fact, most people that recommended the use of the non raid drivers were also faced with this problem, however I had missed that this driver NEEDS the presence of a non raid bios.

So I ask, why is a little simple card trying to play in the RAID playpen while lacking the proper tools to do so? Software raid is so ineffective and such a resource hog, especially as we are moving in the area of parity RAID settings and multiple disks. It’s like a 10 year old driving a rig, sure it’s doable but only at very low speeds to keep it safe.

In any case, my card had a raid bios installed and that caused it to freeze the system. Why it froze is something I don’t know and seemingly no one else knows. On to flashing the bios with a non raid one. SI website has multiple bios,for the non raid one we need the IDE BIOS. Next we need the flashing utility, thankfully there is windows flash utility on the same page, first one. Downloaded that too, and run it. No joy. The command would run but it would return nothing as if it could not continue but with no troubleshooting message or error message or exit variable. SI suggested in a how to flash bios document that if one forces install of the non raid driver (link specifically for the WHS compatible driver list – I used the SiI3114 non-RAID 32-bit Windows Driver which by the way IS the correct driver and ended up using) and connects it to a drive, then in the properties of the controller device a tab would appear labelled Flash Bios that could do the work. Tried that too, about 6 times, uninstalling and hot swapping the drive and going back and forth between the raid and non raid driver. The result was disappointing as it would not allow the flashing of the bios without a restart and a restart would throw an error and the device would not load in the OS. Already getting tired…

More research, many people have this problem and again suggest to use the FreeDOS bootable CD-ROM which means downloading the .iso, opening it, appending the flash DOS utility and the new bios, remaking the .iso and burning it to a CD-ROM.

All of this to make a card work… also I don’t know how to edit .iso files and don’t care as there is also no CD-ROM drive in my WHS anymore (removed it after the initial install – cables in there are already tidied up and I don’t wanna…)

At least this motherboard is USB bootable, and I already have a stick that boots to DOS, put in it the DOS flashing util, the bios and take it to the WHS… which does not boot from it. Seems that my USB flash drive was recognized as a USB HDD and hence the boot order menu didn’t consider it a USB device but an HDD (confused yet?). So when I set up only USB boot devices (USB-Floppy, USB-Zip, USB-CDROM) it ignored the flash drive… Looking why and checking EVERY option in the BIOS as a good paranoid system troubleshooter does, found the Flash drive listed under the HDDs recognized in the boot HDD order. Popped it in first position and finally worked. DOS environment, flash worked bios updated WHS recognized the device and popped the right driver and the HDD was recognized and added to the pool.

That’s 6 hours of troubleshooting and frustration because the manufacturer wanted a RAID bios on a card that is ill-equipped to do proper raid. Congrats and thank you for this adventure.