SATA controller cards ? (WAS : Plextor DVD writer woes)

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Okay, my SATA Plextor DVD writer would not come to life in Linux nor
Windows. 2 year on site worranty, thumbs up to Plextor who got a new
(well, refurbished I believe) drive delivered to me this morning for
free, about 48 hours after I e-mailed them about the problem.
Sadly it still doesn't work.

So now I am looking at my SATA controller PCI card. IT still doens't
detected the drive at boot, and still won't let me enter its BIOS
eventhough I press the required keys when the prompt appears.

I am disappointed, as according to this page:

See http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html 

The chip, a Sil 3112, is 200% open source friendly, with the
manufacturer even releasing the PCB schematics, supports hotplug and and
explicitely supports optical drives.
Then again, any product can be faulty. Problem is, was given this SATA
card, but don't have the recipt for it so, unlike the Plextor drive, I
can't ask for a new one.

So, unless someone tells me they have the same card working in Ubuntu,
then it's rather risky to buythe same card again.

So, it's safer I guess to try a different SATA controller PCI card.

Has anyone got such a thing working on Ubuntu ? With optical drives ?

Thanks in advance for any recommendation...

--
Vince