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