On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Ken Teh wrote:

> I solved the problem and thought I'd pass it along.  The BIOS also has a SATA 
> AHCI setting which was disabled.  After I enabled it, the disks are now 
> recognized as /dev/sd? and I'm getting more reasonable disk speeds.  I also 
> do not get the ata_piix message about "no available legacy ports".

For what it is worth, I believe that for most Intel (and some other) SATA 
controllers switching into AHCI mode and using the ahci driver is the 
right thing to do in terms of both support and best performance.

The ahci (advanced host controller interface) stuff is designed to present 
as a fairly standard sane sata controller and to be the same on all the 
chipsets which implement it - so in theory you don't need *specific* 
drivers for every chipset any more...

Most recent desktops we have seen for the past few years come with the 
BIOS set to have the SATA controller in AHCI mode and the few which have 
it set into ATA mode we manually correct...

  -- Jon