[rants about CS and slave drives elided] Just for the record, my FC3 box at home has a slave drive on CS, working okay for what I'm doing with it. I had bought an extra controller under the advice that slave interfaces are not reliable and the principle that they are no help in attempting to distribute swap. At the time FC wouldn't recognize the slave controller, so I removed it and just cut the partitions so that I am not using both drives at once under any one OS (multiboot, with netbsd and sometimes a debian distro on the slave drive, freeBSD and openBSD together with FC3 on the primary). It works for now, for home, although the drivers have shown up in FC3 since then so I could do it "right" if I wanted. (I've had higher priorities.) The people that sold me the box and the controllers were pleased that I didn't have any particular problems using the slave interface on that particular motherboard. (They had specifically warned me that there would be no guarantees on it.) Not coincidentally, I do not keep anything important on that box, period. It's just experimental stuff, and I pull any important results off immediately. If I ever do keep anything important on it I'll use a good SCSI drive for the important data. The reason -- aside from the write cache problem, I've had much better luck with old SCSI drives than old ATA drives, and it's always the old drives that have the valuable data on them. And old with SCSI means at least twice as many years as with ATA. Manufacturers generally use better processes building SCSI, although there are plenty of exceptions.
