[Beowulf] Arima motherboards with SATA2 drives

[David Mathog]

Have any of you seen a patched BIOS for the Arima HDAM* motherboards
that resolves the issue of the Sil 3114 SATA controller locking up when
it sees a SATA II disk? (Even a disk jumpered to Sata I speeds.) 
Silicon Image released a BIOS fix for this, but since all of these
motherboards use a Phoenix BIOS, it is not like an AMI or Award BIOS,
where there are published methods for swapping out the broken chunk of
BIOS (5.0.49) for the one with the fix (5.4.0.3).  Sure, one could work
around this on a single disk system, at least, with an IDE to SATA2
converter, or a PCI(X) Sata(2) controller, but reflashing the BIOS would
be easier.  Or it would be if Flextronics, who bought this product line
from Arima, would issue another BIOS update :-(.

Thanks,
  
David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech