Getting Sabrent SATA Host Cards to Work

To support a large number of hard drives on our backup machine, we bought a Sabrent SATA 4 port PCI host card (SBT-SRD4).  Guess what?  It hangs with our 1TB drives.  In fact, it will hang with anything larger than 175 GB!

Instead of throwing it out the window, with a bit of googling, we discover that it uses the Silicon Image 3114 controller, which has a bios update and utility at: http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=28&cid=15&ctid=2&osid=0& .  If you can make a DOS boot disk, by downloading the BIOS Update Utility for DOS and the Si3114 IDE Bios, you can unzip both onto the boot disk, reboot, and run “updflash b5304.bin”.

Hmm.… I don’t use floppy drives anymore.  But all is still not lost!  Follow Bart’s instructions to make a bootable DOS CD-Rom, and copy updflash.exe and b5304.bin to your bcd\cds\cdroms\files directory before making the ISO.  Then you have a nice bootable CD that can be used to flash the Sabrent SATA card.  Unfortunately, since it uses Windows 98 drivers, I am unable to upload the ISO for direct download.  However, I hope to have saved you some time by pointing you to useful resources.

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