Let me add in that some users have had issues using the driver from Windows Update. One of our 's (cats) found some major problems after updating to this driver. Stick with the ones supplied with the support CD and I think you will be fine.

I really don't trust Maxtor drives unless they're rigorously -*test*-('")ed on NF4 based motherboards. The issue can take months to manifest itself. I've had them die in days and I've had them last six months. To be safe, check with Maxtor and see if your drives are in the series that need the update before you put anything important on them.

Arlie, I contacted Maxtor and they sent me a firmware upgrade. I will try it tomorrow.

I ran the firmware update. Maxtor recommended using the SIL114 controller, however I couldn't get it to work properly. I instead used the Nvidia controller and it updated easily. Windows booted right up and it seems to be working smoothly.

You should be good to go on either controller now. You have far more patience than I; I gave up on the Maxtors and gave the final pair or 250's away before the updates became available. There is not a Maxtor drive in the house at this point that is not on a P4.

OldFilmFan,
Following many emails to both ASUS and SiliconImage on the problem of getting independent drives to work on the Sil contoller (all their tips were useless), I used a workaround. By the way I was using WD and Seagate drives, not Maxtor, at the time.

Not wanting RAID, I bought a PCI SATA card with 4 ports. It also uses the Sil3114 chip, but comes with a driver for non-raid setups. With the motherboard Sil-raid chip disabled in BIOS, I added the card, installed the new driver, and plugged in the drives. Works like a charm. The card cost about $30 then, but I had already invested many hours of wasted time so it was worth the cost.

Arlie and Roderick,

Just wanted to say thanks. Thanks, because I bought a new SATA 3 500 gig Seagate 7200.9 and I connected it to the SATA_RAID ports on my A8N-SLI PREMIUM, because they are both RAID and SATA 3 connectors and for some reason the computer was not recognizing the drive. Then I decided to check here, and low and behold I read this,
" Yes you need to enable the controller in BIOS to use it. Just remember that
to use the disc as a non raid setup one has to set them as JBOD in the setup
utility...."

So then I checked my ASUS manual, setup the JBOD, and boom. She's working like a charm!!!