Agreed. There were a couple of surprises in sdata/sdide with some of the
PIO timings.

A bit of a tangeng, but a while back I switched my Plan 9 machines over to
Atom and haven't looked back. The current configuration I use has a pair of
D525 boards with 4GB of DDR3 and a small SATADOM for nvram/9fat. The file
server has a couple of 2.5" trays I use for write cache and a StarTech.com
PCIe 8-port serial card (patch/uart-ox). I've built close to 20 of these
over the last couple of years, mostly as standalone console servers. I've
had good luck with the OCZ's, though I avoid consumer grade drives like the
plague.

Obligatory picture attached.


On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:43 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:

> > I was running a really bastardized mix of old and new boot software,
> > so it's quite possible I screwed up installing the correct MBR and
> > boot loader.  But it might also have been a problem with the BIOS or
> > SATA controller on the motherboard -- it's a slightly ancient
> > Supermicro Atom 1U, and it doesn't like SATA hard disks, either (it's
> > currently talking to an IDE disk).  I didn't have time to try 9atom.
>
> that sort of machine is 9atom's original raison d'être.
> also there were some issues with ide in pio mode recently
> fixed.  (credit: stallion)  you may still want to look at 9atom
> even in ide mode.
>
> (i'm not absolving the drive.  just saying that there are plan 9
> issues affecting your machine.)
>
> - erik
>
>