Serial ATA Support FAQ - Kernel 3.10  06/09/2006
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Q: How do I use SATA drives with Amithlon?
A: Just treat them the same as normal IDE drives. The kernel presents 
   SATA devices to Amithlon as just another IDE device.

Q: Can I enable DMA for SATA drives?
A: Yes. Use the SetDMA utility. SATA drives are mapped in as hde and 
   hdf, with IDE drives remaining as hda to hdd. Ie, type 'SetDMA hde'
   to switch on DMA for the first SATA drive.

Q: My motherboard has 4 SATA ports. Can I use all of them?
A: Only the first two SATA ports are supported. Extra ports may or may 
   not work.

Q: Do SATA devices perform as good as IDE ones?
A: A little better, in fact. The SATA drive I use for testing benchmarks
   at 6.5MB/sec in PIO mode and 67MB/sec with DMA, which is better than
   anything I've recorded for IDE/PATA drives.

Q: What SATA chipsets are supported?
A: At the moment only SATA ports connected to a motherboard's South Bridge
   chip will work. Any ports connected to a dedicated SATA chip, such as
   those made by Silicon Image or Promise, don't work.

   Supported chipsets are:

   * NVidia NForce 3 and NForce 3-250
   * NVidia NForce 4 and NForce 4 SLI
   * VIA VT8237 South Bridge

   More chipsets will be supported when donations permit the purchase of
   suitable hardware.

Q: I've bought a new SATA drive but the kernel doesn't detect it!
A: You're probably trying to run a SATA-300 drive on a SATA-150 controller.
   The drive should have a jumper setting that will lock it to SATA-150 
   mode.

Q: Can I hot-plug SATA drives?
A: No. Doing so will cause the system to crash and possibly corrupt the drive.