I use a SiI3114 based PCI SATA card in my 486. At 40 MHz FSB it is limited to 40 MB/s.
I have replaced its RAID BIOS with the non-RAID "SATALink" BIOS for DOS compatiblity issues.
There are no DOS / Windows 3.1 drivers.
CDROM is on onboard PATA connector.
An I am using a 128 GB SSD.

My partition scheme:
Below the 8 GB limit there are:
DOS
Logical / Data Exchange
Windows 2000 (doing bootmanager too)
Win98SE partition starts at cylinder 1021 and uses rest of the disk.

Do NOT create the partitions for that disk using Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 or 11.

Unfortuneately my controller won't boot from the SSD when a CDROM is connected to a SATA connector. However, the drive runs well when I plug in the SATA connector after BIOS has finished its detection.
You also may try a SiI3112 based controller.

If you want bootable, you need one with an onboard BIOS.

I will not tough the ones with the SIL chipsets as they have a very bad habit of corrupting data and also being very particular about what they will actually work with at all.

Promise and Maxtor (rebranded Promise if I remember correctly) are really the only safe bets.

I have a Rosewill RC-212 which uses a Via chipset. As mentioned above, my card has a BIOS and does boot from attached SSD and HDD drives.

Many PCI SATA cards support SATA1 mode, but I've seen some that support SATA2 mode. A card based on the Sil3124 is an example.

One downside in DOS is that none of these controllers (to my knowledge) have CD-ROM initialization drivers which limits their utility in newer systems that lack IDE controllers or IDE-compatible SATA controllers. I'm not a programmer, but I doubt it would be hard to write such a driver since open-source drivers for Win NT and OS/2 support these controllers. I don't think anyone has bother to try so far.

Thank you so much to everyone who replied.

cyclone3d wrote on 2025-02-22, 15:04:

Promise and Maxtor (rebranded Promise if I remember correctly) are really the only safe bets.

I agree. Promise controllers have worked best for me. Solid performance & compatibility and they always have BIOS extensions.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2025-02-22, 16:46:

One downside in DOS is that none of these controllers (to my knowledge) have CD-ROM initialization drivers which limits their utility in newer systems that lack IDE controllers or IDE-compatible SATA controllers. I'm not a programmer, but I doubt it would be hard to write such a driver since open-source drivers for Win NT and OS/2 support these controllers. I don't think anyone has bother to try so far.

IIRC either XCDROM.SYS or one of the other "modern" drivers from FreeDOS worked on my Sil3114

Disruptor wrote on 2025-02-22, 09:54:

Unfortuneately my controller won't boot from the SSD when a CDROM is connected to a SATA connector. However, the drive runs well when I plug in the SATA connector after BIOS has finished its detection.
You also may try a SiI3112 based controller.

I have run into issues with the Sil3114 and Award BIOS 4.51PG and the number of hard drives count at 0040:0075 not getting set to 1. You could check using a boot disk with DEBUG on it. I have had a private message conversation with mkarcher about this. I wonder if it's related, as I don't remember trying both with and without CD-ROM.