WD Caviar and Sabrent SRD4 SATA card | arfore dot com

A couple of  weekends ago I was rebuilding my home NAS to replace the Openfiler installation with CentOS 5.5.

After adding my two new Western Digital Green Caviar 1TB drives I booted the computer up to find that only the Hitachi drive was being found. After a little troubleshooting I determined that the problem was with the add-in SATA controller, a Sabrent SRD4 4-port controller.

It turns out that the firmware for the Silicon Images 3114CTU chipset support the drives. I found a post online that concerned a different model of drive, and that his problems were resolved with a firmware update.

After researching the chipset and controller I found that while Sabrent didn’t have a firmware update available, there was one available on the Silicon Images website.

After figuring out how to go about running the updater from a boot cd, since this is a Linux machine with no floppy drive, I was able to successfully use my new drives as additional storage!