> I have one Seagate Barracuda SATA drive that is seen by the system BIOS > on the primary master IDE channel. I suspect different boards and BIOSs > will handle SATA differently - some will handle it as some kind of SCSI, > and some as some kind of IDE, but I could be wrong. I have used hdparm > on my SATA drive as though it were an IDE, but it didn't change much. Really, what I'm referring to are the "IDE madness" things about hdparm: the X (chipset timings, which are very dangerous), the -m settings, the bus-mastering DMA settings (-d1), etc. IDE needed to have abandoned this whole Cylinder/Head/Sector fiction a long long time ago, and you'd have thought with all of the re-invented schemes and shifting "size barriers", the standards bodies would have just embraced an LBA scheme which has served SCSI without a single incident of drama since 1985, but noooooo... Anyway. The long and short of it is, with SATA interfaces and drives, the bus mastering DMA/multi-sector/chipset timing stuff should be setup appropriately without hand-waving. For modern Linux kernels built with chipset-specific IDE drivers internally, it should also be setup optimally. The chaos factor is for these wingnut distros which build "generic" kernels and/or leave things to the whims of the gods and BIOS. =MB= -- A focus on Quality.
