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Huzzah, my SATA DVD drive works!

So; I bought myself a Plextor PX-712SA, to replace my crap, noisy, slow Pioneer 8x dual-layer thingy. Crap? Slow? Well, yes - every other CD or DVD drive I’ve had let you lock it down into a sane 4x CLV mode, which may not have been particularly fast for copying a gig of warez at a time, but, for “normal” randomly-accessed files - photos and emails, for example - and also for ripping audio CDs - CLV outperforms the supposedly-faster CAV modes. The Pioneer lacked this option, so I was left with a drive that took half a minute to speed up just to read a disc’s Table of Contents, tens of seconds to change track, and sounded like a hovercraft full of hoovers.

Rather than going for a bog-standard OEM replacement, I decided to spend an extra tenner on shiney(sic). Yep, the Plextor will burn DVDs at 12x, and connects using nice, neat SATA cables.

it even looks better than the Pioneer

Unfortunately, running ATAPI-over-SATA is a new-fangled thing - the Plextor is the first drive on the market to use it. Support for it in the linux kernel is “in progress”. It debuted in kernel 2.6.10, but to enable it, you have to change include/linux/libata.h from “#undef ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI ” to “#define ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI ” before recompiling.

I tried that, but it didnt seem to work. So, I then applied Alan Cox’s 2.6.10-ac12 patchset, since it featured some libata updates. That didn’t work either.

Next, I moved to the latest prepatch kernel, 2.6.11-rc4. The diff from 2.6.10 is 22 megabytes! Bloody hell, I didnt realise work on the kernel was taking place quite that quickly - I remember a couple of megs being the norm between major versions in the 2.4 series.

So, after applying the patch, editing libata.h, and recompiling (bypassing a broken DVB driver that caused things to break the first time I tried it), the bloody thing still wasn’t detected on startup. Agh!

It was at this point that I got round to reading the docs, and found Plextor’s compatibility list. I have an ABIT KV8-MAX3 motherboard, and had plugged the Plextor into one of the VIA sata sockets - and it’s not fully supported.

Easy solution, then - plug it into one of the SIL ports, and… huzzah!, it all was recognised immediately.

Ah well.

The moral of the story, kids, is to not buy new-fangled shiney without checking the manufacturer’s compatibility list first. An even more pertinent moral is “don’t run MS windows” - just look at that list again. Support for just about every current motherboard was disabled by the latest MS Service Pack! tcha!

Now that it’s running, by the way, the PX-712SA is a fantastic performer. It seems that the step up from UDMA to SATA is as big as the one from PIO to UDMA. Top transfer speeds are around the same, of course - but system overhead is much lower. CPU-intensive tasks - encoding freshly-ripped music, for example - really benefit from this. With the Pioneer, I could rip a CD at around 16x, but I then had to batch-encode them overnight, and I could never be arsed doing that. Ripping and encoding together went at around 4.5-5x normal playback speed, which was an awfully long time to wait, especially with the insanely annoying hoovering noise.

The Plextor, on the other hand, can rip-and-encode at a consistent 12x - getting through a CD in less than half the time. It’s also quite a bit quieter (though it’s still noisy enough to be irritating to someone as curmudgeonly as me).

Yes. An extra tenner well spent, then.