[lug] speaking of CD-R's that suck...

[Matt Thompson]

D. Stimits wrote:
> Is SATA working well on plain hard drives? The mentioned ioctl stuff 
> makes me wonder if SATA is a good idea at all.

I am really liking the SATA HD in my new box at work.  Very speedy and 
the thin cables are always a plus.  And I don't think the ioctl bit (not 
supported in libata) matters too much.  The main thing it does is make 
utilities like hdparm and smartctl not work well, I think.  hdparm 
doesn't matter much because SATA drives can't really be modded like IDE 
drives can, i.e., all SATA drives are DMA or better.  (In fact, I think 
the effort now is to get PIO working with SATA for CF readers, et al.) 
smartctl would be nice, and if you need it, there is a patch out there 
you can use to get it working.

The problem with the 712SA and Linux is that you can't use the 712SA 
with Linux!  At least, when Gentoo hackers say things like:

If you have an DVD SATA Burner which is connected through an internel 
PATA Interface (e.g. Plextor 712SA) there is no chance for using it.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_SATA

that is when I figure there is no way to get it to work.  If the Gentoo 
community has no workaround...

Matt
-- 
Learning just means you were wrong and they were right. - Aram
    Matt Thompson -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/
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