rloew Posted December 18, 2010 Share Posted December 18, 2010 I've bought Unitek PCI-SATA-4r controller with SiI 3114CTU chip. It does have a HDD LED connector, so I was counting on an usable HDD activity LED. This particular feature works, all right. But...1) The controller built in RAID BIOS does not work with just a single drive. I had to make a concatenation raid setup with a single drive selected. I was able to get the HDD working in DOS that way.2) I'm unable to find a working driver for the Windows 98. The box says, the controller is Windows 98 compatible, but there are no proper driver on the CD. Apparently, the PCI device and vendor id does not match the INF file entries (VEN_1095&DEV_3114&SUBSYS_71141095&REV_02). It is possible to install a driver for the soft raid controller version, but it does not work correctly. It is enough to access a partition from the SATA drive for the Windows to hang completely. Forcing to install the driver from a proper folder does give the same result as the software raid version.I have been able to use other Silicon Image SATA cards with my SATA Patch. I don't see why that one would not work unless it is AHCI only. I can't guarantee that the activity LED would work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sfor Posted December 19, 2010 Share Posted December 19, 2010 The problematic 1TB drive works perfectly with SiI 3512 PCI SATA controller. But, the driver package for SiI 3114 does not cover the SiI 3114CTU VEN_1095&DEV_3114&SUBSYS_71141095 ID. Apparently, not all SiI 3114 chip versions are Windows 98 compatible, as the driver development stopped at 1.0.0.8 version and does not cover newer SiI 3114 chip releases. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rloew Posted December 19, 2010 Share Posted December 19, 2010 The problematic 1TB drive works perfectly with SiI 3512 PCI SATA controller. But, the driver package for SiI 3114 does not cover the SiI 3114CTU VEN_1095&DEV_3114&SUBSYS_71141095 ID. Apparently, not all SiI 3114 chip versions are Windows 98 compatible, as the driver development stopped at 1.0.0.8 version and does not cover newer SiI 3114 chip releases.You can try stripping the SUBSYS specification off of one entry in the INF file and see if it works. Otherwise you will need my SATA Patch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rloew Posted December 22, 2010 Share Posted December 22, 2010 (edited) WARNING - AHCI Mode SATA is not compatable with Windows 9X.AHCI Mode requires Protected Mode access to Memory. Windows 9X will crash with an IOS Error if any FAT Partitions are present before any Protected Mode Driver can be loaded.If the BIOS is set to AHCI Mode or any Card is present that Boots in AHCI mode, any Drive connected to it must not contain any Partitions recognized by DOS or Windows. Only NTFS, Linux and other Partitions can be present. Compatability mode will not work either.DOS EMM386 will crash even if no Partitions are present on a Drive connected to an AHCI enabled Controller.The Highpoint Rocket 620 HBA (SATA 3) PCI-E Card packaged with the Western Digital 3GB Hard Drive is an AHCI only Card using the Marvell 9125 Controller. It cannot be switched out of AHCI mode so it cannot be used. It also does not support the full 3GB.The JMicron PCI-E AHCI Cards, I have tested, boot in Native Mode and can be used with my Patch.None of the PCI Cards I have tested support AHCI so this is not an issue. Edited December 23, 2010 by rloew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted July 14, 2011 Share Posted July 14, 2011 Poor performance of the SATA HDD to PATA adapter could be related to 40 pin connection detection and transfer limited to UDMA2. It is possible to force the detection of 80 pin cable through grounding pin 34 in the IDE interface. After such a modification my adapter outperformed PCI SATA controller.Sfor, I suspect I have an identical adapter on hand... Could you please provide pics of both sided of your adapter, after the modification, together with a description of how to modify it? Thanks in advance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sfor Posted July 14, 2011 Share Posted July 14, 2011 The device is no longer in my posession, I'm afraid. It worked well for more than a year, and now it ia a part of a backup server. I'm planning to buy a few of those in the future.The modification was emulating the 80 wires cable. Inside of those line from pin 34 is grounded. So, IDE controller can see a difference between 40 wire and 80 wire cables. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TmEE Posted July 14, 2011 Share Posted July 14, 2011 (edited) I have been using an ALi chipset based RAID card with 1x IDE and 2x SATA and so far I have not had any problems. It presents drives as SCSI drives to the PC and you can use them without problems in Win9x. IIRC the drives were all accessible even in DOS mode but I got to check that part again. I am having 2x 40GB IDE drives in RAID0 on it for doing faster audio and video editing and SATA is kept in non RAID config with pair of 250GB drives connected.XP in my PC is not fond of that card though, it makes booting really slow for some reason... Edited July 14, 2011 by TmEE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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