A8N SLi Deluxe and Premium

Can someone confirm whether the SIL 3114 on board SATA ports ONLY work in RAID or whether you can fun just SATA drives off it.

I have two drives which when connected, the deluxe fails to get past the booting screen. Disabling the 3114 in the BIOS turns the SATA ports off and it don't detect anything attached.

Can someone put me out of misery and tell me how to connect ordinary SATA drives to the SIL 3114 ports without RAID.

Thanks in advance.

Not sure mate, why dont you use the nvidia ports?

raid and single there's 2 drivers 1 for raid and 1 for single use + you set it in bios
also.

MeatLoaf said:

Not sure mate, why dont you use the nvidia ports?

Click to expand...

Sorry should have made it clear in original post - I have 4 SATA drives on the NVRaid ports running as single drives. The two drives were SATA 5 and 6 which I wanted to run on the SIL 3114 ports. ( I have 6 drives in total - 2 x 200, 2 x 250 and 2 x 300). For now maximum space is important so I want to run all as single drives - performance isn;t too much of an issue as it's storage I'm after.

James32 - can you expand - I can only see 1 driver on the ASUS site (I have installed version 1.9.9 IIRC) and this only allows RAID use. The settings in the BIOS aren't to enable RAID or single drive use, but the setting seems to be whether to enable the ports or not. If I turn the SIL 3114 off in the BIOS - then nothing is detected on the ports at all, if I enable it - it hangs unless I set up a RAID system.

Thanks again

EDITED

I know for a single drive using those ports, it's this but thats for a boot drive on those ports...

If you are only installing one SATA hard drive, ignore the SATA RAID BIOS configuration utility.


Can be done, but sounds like you get to that and it hangs.
Thought...search http://www.siliconimage.com/ for drivers... <bad site that

I'm going to add a big EDIT here..

Search over here (ASUS forum) for 3114.

The sata controller in the above link is a 3112, and it seems they are different in some respects.
Lots seem to be having the same problem as you.

The driver in bottom post here by rufsen (3114_x86_win32_base_logo_1205.zip ) doesn't have the raid config..

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) Adding the SiI 3114 controller to an existing Windows 2000/XP or
Windows Server 2003 installation
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow the instructions in this section to install the Silicon Image SiI 3114
SATALink controller into a system already running Windows 2000/XP or Windows
Server 2003.


1. Power off the system. Insert the SiI 3114 SATALink controller into an
available PCI slot. Connect serial ATA cable(s) between the SiI 3114
controller and the serial ATA device(s). Power up the system.

2. During OS boot up, Windows will display the 'Found New Hardware Wizard'.
Click 'Next'.

3. Select 'Search for a suitable driver for my device
(Recommended)' and Click 'Next'.

4. Under 'Optional search locations' insure that 'Floppy disk drives'
is checked.

5. Insert the diskette labeled 'Silicon Image SiI 3114 SATALink Driver
Installation Disk' into A: and click 'Next'.

6. When the wizard indicates that it found a driver for the device click
'Next'.

7. If the 'Digital Signature Not Found' dialog appears, click 'Yes' to
continue installing the driver.

8. The wizard will now copy the required files to the system and start the
driver. After starting the driver the wizard will display a completion
dialog, click 'Finish' to exit the wizard.

9. See instructions in section 4 to verify controller was installed
correctly.

Thanks for this split - alas the advice refers only to the PCI cards and not to embedded chips.

From the SIL site it seems that the SATA BIOS is included in the A8N BIOS so looks like I'm stuffed (assuming I have understood correctly).

Cheers again