I flashed my drive about 3 months ago per ala42’s instructions and everything worked fine, my snail-pace drive actually became useful.
However, all of a sudden the riplock has returned and its now slower than a fortnight again. Could this be because of automatically upgraded firmware? I’d just like to check before i do any re-flashing, so that i can avoid a dead drive, i was nervous enough doing it the first time 
Thanks =]
[QUOTE=Jacen_solo762;2063229]I flashed my drive about 3 months ago per ala42’s instructions and everything worked fine, my snail-pace drive actually became useful.
[B]However, all of a sudden the riplock has returned[/B] and its now slower than a fortnight again. Could this be because of automatically upgraded firmware? I’d just like to check before i do any re-flashing, so that i can avoid a dead drive, i was nervous enough doing it the first time 
Thanks =][/QUOTE]
That is impossible.
Check the DMA mode first.
Same thing happened on the GSA-H55N here too. DMA is set to automatic and was detected as DMA-5. I’m confused by this. I’ve even re-flashed the firmware and riplock is still present… Worked fine for a few weeks…
EDIT
Wow…so I was wrong. Those were my HDDs. DMA was enabled BUT it detected PIO mode. A quick search brought me to this page: http://winhlp.com/node/10
which contains this VB Script: http://winhlp.com/tools/resetdma.vbs
Ran that…rebooted…detected as DMA Mode 4 and works FINE now!