I have been wanting to do an update on my Sil Boards, mainly for enabling 750GB+ HDD support. Currently I have a custom build Opteron 246 with 2GB DDRII Reg. as a NAS for all my SOHO, Home files, that utilizes 2x 3114 PCI Cards with 8x250GB HDD for storage and 2x160GB system disks on a 3112, running openSUSE 10.1(too lazy to do an upgrade:-).
The Sil controllers are setup as IDE and not RAID, I let the OS manage the RAID part, since it is a lot more versatile.
All the disks are separated in pairs and are mirrored, ie I have 4x250GB volumes, without any real data separation/indexing I just add a new folder for different media and then symlink them to my highly ordered /~ partition, I find this quite convenient(although it requires the added step of creating the symlinks) since it is easier to replace a pair of the disks with a new one really fast, for example the original setup had 8x160GB HDD's.
To my need for a Sil BIOS update, I am in need of space for quite some time now, and I had the option of either replacing some of the pairs with 500GB HDD's or 750GB ones and after looking at the prices I chose to change the 2 pairs initially to 750GB which would give me a nice boost on storage(+1TB).
After 2 days of waiting the disks arrived, only to find out that the controllers would not support them, after some searching on the Sil website, I found tools to update the BIOS on windows and DOS, the unfortunate thing is that my only windows install is on a VMWare virtual machine and I have not had a DOS install for more than a decade. At that time came FreeDOS to save the day, upon visiting the site I found the FreeDOS v1.0 ISO, using ISOMaster I added a new directory containing the Flash images of the Sil controllers including the updflash and updbios tools, burned the CD and after about 5 minutes I had a fully functional system with my new HDD's.
I did not update the on board controller(3112) since its more complex, it seems (I have not looked at it too much) that I needed to "patch" the mobo manufacturers bios with the updbios tool and then update the board with it, since I will not be using anything larger than the 160GB HDD's on it, I chose to skip that step, but I will be setting up an older Athlon mobo with a 3112 on board controller to check if its safe some time latter.
3 comments:
Nice post. I'd tried for two days to update the bios on my 3114-based card using the windows tools with no success. Always some damned bios/driver incompatibility.
Then I saw your post about freedos and the dos-based update util.
Slapped the bios onto a usb key, booted the freedos livecd, ran the updater, and it just worked.
Thanks!
Kean
Nice post! I altso updated my bios, but afterwards i get an alarming amount of CRC errors on some files written to the drive connected to the sil 3114-based card.
Have you altso experinced this kind of behavior?
No problems encountered with the controller after the update, maybe you should check with another HDD?
Post a Comment