Recently I got myself a Delock SATA controller which is SiI 3512 based. Here's a link to manufacturers page: https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_70096/merkma … ?setLanguage=en. I found the card on a Polish eBay alternative for about 10EUR plus shipping. The plan was to put it in a computer which runs Windows 98, connect a SATA SSD drive and enjoy Windows 98 with no HDD noise and relatively fast transfer rates. By default controller came with SiI 3512 SATARaid BIOS flashed so it required reflashing to SiI 3512 SATALink BIOS, as it was described in one of the first posts. So, on the still attached IDE disk I've placed a BIOS file 'B4370.BIN', 'UPDFLASH.EXE', with help of 'F8' key booted into DOS mode and flashed the BIOS. Process went nice and smooth.
Next step was to format the disk and put the Windows 98 installation files there along with all the necessary drivers, for that I used SystemRescueCD booted over PXE. Everything 'so far' went fine and time came for Windows 98 setup. Here the problems started. Setup crashed immediately after welcome screen, returning 'write error' message. Booting from Windows 98 CD, formatting disk and starting installation from CD led to the same issue. I've also experienced interesting thing - some attempts to create directories didn't produced any errors, but the directories were not there.
Since I noticed that '43.70' was not the newest BIOS for the controller, I googled a bit and found 'BIOS-003512-xxx-4384.zip' package for SiI 3512. Inside are BIOS ROMs for both SATALink and SATARaid. Long story short, 'b4384.bin' did the trick. After flashing it I was able to successfully install Windows 98 and the driver found in 'SWD-003x12-00W-1361.zip' attached to one of previous posts (first I've installed VIA Hyperion drivers for MSI KT4AV KT400A motherboard). No issues so far.
Attached to this message is a BIOS I used for flashing the controller, also an ATTO Disk Benchmark screenshot showing read rates going up to about 66MB/s and write rates around 37MB/s.
SiI3512_Bench.png
#1: GigaByte GA-586ATE/P, Pentium MMX 166MHz, 56MB EDO RAM, S3 Virge DX + 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics, Yamaha YMF719, 3Com 3C509
#2: ASUS P2B-F, Pentium III 1GHz, 512MB SDRAM, 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000, Yamaha YMF724F, 3Com 3C900B-TPO