Recently purchased a new 750GB SATA drive and a nice Vantec Nexstar 3 enclosure with the eSata interface, allowing up to 3.0Gbps transfer rates. (Only 1.5Gbps on PCI SATA)
Plugged it into a new SI3114 based PCI card. Interestingly the Linux kernel (stock 2.6.18) seemed to handle a power-up of the 750GB drive without any problem when the system was already running, however the 5.0.32 firmware it shipped with would freeze when the drive had power during the BIOS post. The common problem was easily resolved by downloading a firmware upgrade from Silicon Image and upgrading to the 5.4 series BIOS.
After building the FreeDOS bootdisk as recommended in the README, entering the command updflash r5314.bin fixed everything.
