gaboo

Bad sectors? DOA? I bought openbox memory before from newegg twice before. It worked fine and dandy every time... Same goes for graphic card, although that one didn't work until I paired it with a beefier power supply. I assume that incompatibility or user incompetence were amongst the reasons for returns, and it seems I was right. Can't figure out why someone would return a drive though. Other than bought SATA but needed PATA kinda' stuff... I did buy an openbox floppy once (hey it had free shipping which halved the price), and it was DOA. Can someone here share their experience with newegg openbox drives?

I have an ancient WD 6.4Gb that DOES NOT work mounted vertically. It starts giving sector not found kind of errors in a few minutes. I think the termal calibration doesn't work in vertical position. No problems with it mounted horizontally though...

I've bought the syba card and I'm happy with it. $20.45 got me the RAID version shipped. If the longer warranty makes you happy, go for the SIIG. IMO it's a waste of money. If you look carefully, you'll notice that all these cards use the reference siimage drivers, so the price difference is only in the branding and possibly pcb. According to the siimage site, *ANY* card with flash chip is cappable of RAID; there is only one version of the SIL0680 chip and it is RAID capable. The syba card comes with an AMD flash chip. Also note that (all?) these cards are 5volt PCI 2.2, so you won't be able to use them in a PCI 3.0 / PCI-X system.

Thanks Will, very helpful thread. Syba technical support also confirmed by email that their card is flashable, and also confirmed compatibilty with stock siimage firmware. They replied my email within 24 (business) hours, so kudos to them

It seems that SIIG SC-PE4B12 (aka Ultra133 rev 3.0) has flashable bios. But it costs twice as much and has no other features (except 5yr warranty) compared to the other two cards. The dam' flash chip can't cost $20+ ... Is anybody using this one?

It seems that somebody updated the bios on a Koutech somehow: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/...tid=137&tid=198 Not saying if it was flash or he just got another chip like in the days of the Promise Ultra33

Does anyone know a controller with SIL0680/CMD-0680 that has flashable firmware? I'm looking at SYBA and Koutech card specs, but neither mentions a flashable firmware... TIA.