Once there, just type ahci.bat and press enter. Go through the wizard to use the FreeDOS in LiveCD mode until you get to a command prompt. If your OS is set to UEFI boot, go to BIOS setup and set it to use Legacy boot and disable secure boot. Once you finish flashing the image, you can just drag and drop the contents of the ZIP containing the firmware onto the USB thumbdrive. balenaEtcher won’t function and will complain about the USB thumbdrive not being bootable. Obtain FreeDOS and create a bootable USB stick using Rufus. I have used the ASM1062 Firmware Version: 201105_00_76_00 firmware from Ableconn to flash two OWC cards: You can obtain the firmware files from the TechPowerUp Forums from this specific thread, or obtaining it from an OEM like Ableconn. Please refer to the card manufacturer or ASMedia first for obtaining the firmware update files before using the linked firmware files. Obtaining the firmware WARNING: These links point to third-party sites with firmware and driver versions that might not work for your system or can lead to software or hardware bricking. There’s a new Kernel patch that should help fix the issue regarding incorrect PCIe payload size, but it does not appear to work for these cards. The firmware on the OWC cards are dated September 2014 and is incompatible with new systems. The reason is that these cards come with a firmware dating back to 2014 and the firmware is incompatible with newer hardware, and most vendors do not provide a way to update the firmware:

Some of these cards come with heavily out of date firmware, mainly the OWC Accelsior S cards and will cause kernel crashes or PCIe issues: One example is that ICY-DOCK ToughArmor MB839SP-B uses slower ASM1061, while OWC Accelsior S uses the faster ASM1062. There are variations of these cards where some use the slower ASMedia ASM1061 chipset and some use the faster ASMedia ASM1062 chipset. Updating firmware on PCIe SATA expansion cards using ASMedia ASM106x series SATA controllerĪSM106x is the popular chipset for SATA III PCIe expansion (add-on) cards, RAID and M.2, such as: SilverStone ECS03, OWC Accelsior S, Delock, I/O Crest, Syba, StarTech, Ableconn and probably many more.

Asmedia 106x firmware upgrade