PCI-SATA Controller not seen in BIOS - RC-209-EX

[Muad Dib]

I installed a Rosewill RC-209-EX PCI to SATA controller in an Inspiron 530. The 530 MOBO is a Foxconn G33-M03. My graphics card covered one MOBO SATA port leaving me with just 3 MOBO SATA ports and I need more. The RC-209-EX provides 4 additional ports. The RC-209-EX is an SIL-3114 based controller.

System is Windows 7 - 64 bit.

The controller and HDDs and Optical drives attached to it are seen and function correctly when booted into Windows 7. Granted the transfer speeds top out at 26MB/s but that is a PCI bus limitation as far as I can tell.

The problem is that the controller/devices are NOT seen by the BIOS during boot-up and hence I cannot boot from any devices attached to it. In particular any Optical drive.

I have tried installing the card in the other PCI slot and have tried it with no other PCI devices installed (except video card installed in the PCI-E x16 slot).

I have flashed the RC-209-EX with both the RAID and NON_RAID BIOSes available from SIL - no luck.

I DO NOT get the expected "CTRL-S" option to configure the RC-209-EX with a RAID during boot.

I DO get the "CTRL-I" option to configure an RAID using the Foxconn G33 MOBO RAID controller.

I am not interested in setting up a RAID. I would just like to be able to boot from a device (Optical) connected to the RC-209-EX.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated! (Besides replace the MOBO/System 😀 )

Thanks!

 

[RealBeast]

Unfortunately, that controller is a POS and will not allow booting from its drives if the motherboard doesn't support booting from a SCSI device in the bios boot order. It also has significant limitations on drive size.

The only thing that you really can do, short of getting a new card, is to arrange your drives and opticals so that anything you want to boot from is on the motherboard controllers and only storage devices are on the Rosewill.

 

[Muad Dib]

Best answer selected by Muad Dib.

 

[Muad Dib]

Thanks for confirming the bad news, I knew it was not an ideal choice just an inexpensive stop-gap until I decide on a better solution.

 

[Muad Dib]

Just out of curiosity, is the 26MB/s transfer speed a limitation of the RC-209-EX card or is it a limitation of the PCI bus speed of the Foxconn G33 MOBO?

 

[RealBeast]

Don't know which one is limiting you (my guess would be the RC-209-EX), but IIRC PCI bus maximum transfer rate was 133MB/s for the 32 bit wide bus.

 

[Muad Dib]

Here is gotcha. Configure the RC-209-RX to provide 1 eSATA port. Connected new external HDD enclosure (USB and eSATA connectors) via eSATA port. Same transfer/HD Tune Benchmark speed as HDD connected to RC-209-EX internal SATA port - 26MB/s. No surprise there.

Connected same new external enclosure using USB connector. HD Tune benchmark 32.5 MB/s. USB is faster than my eSATA/internal SATA of RC-209-EX.

Others report much better transfer rates for RC-209-EX than I am getting. Conclusion - my Foxconn G33 MOBO is bottlenecking on PCI bus?


Anyway, am beginning earnest shopping for an Asus P5Q or Gigabyte G45 class MOBO upgrade. Yeah, Fleabay hear I come.