Anne Wilson wrote: > The future is there, but for the moment I'm happy to stay with IDE. I asked > on another ML whether anyone knew if mixing SATA and PATA caused any > problems. I got no replies, so if I experiment with the mixture it will be > on a box that doesn't matter too much. Um. What sort of answers were you expecting? If some-one *had* experienced problems, they might have told you -- but who would be willing to say "No, there are absolutely no problems mixing SATA and PATA"? It's very difficult to prove a negative like that. I've heard of a few occasional problems to do with boot order (an OS thinks one disk should be the "first" disk while the BIOS thinks it's the other way round). That can normally be handled by grub and BIOS options and the like. That sort of thing is likely to be obvious *before* the computer has finished booting: if it boots correctly, it's going to be OK. The other problem I've heard about is http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html#tx2 (SATA and PATA on the same Promise controller), which has a "preliminary patch" according to that site. But, in general, I haven't heard of any problems once you've got the machine working. I wouldn't expect any problems. If problems were widespread I'd have expected to have heard about them. I'd *especially* have expected to have heard of problems with SATA hard drives and ATAPI (parallel) CD drives, since that appears to have been *very* common. Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james | People have believed for hundreds of years that newts @westexe.demon.co.uk | in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, | and in all that time never asked themselves whether | the newts got out to go to the lavatory. | -- "Reaper Man", Terry Pratchett
