SATA cards for CD drives, suggestion ??

[Phillip Susi]

I ordered one of those drives a few weeks ago, and ended up returning 
it.  Unfortunately, that is the only sata optical drive on the market 
right now, so as you are finding, support for sata optical drives is 
somewhat lacking.  I tried it on two different controllers and the bios 
for one of them worked, the other did not; it would not boot the drive 
and instead spent a good 60 seconds just screwing with it at boot time 
before giving up.  Linux also didn't seem to like it and I had read a 
few posts online talking about special parameters to get it working. 
Since it looked like it was going to be a pain, and the one controller 
that I really had to use it on couldn't boot from it, I decided to just 
return the drive and get the pata version.

Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A few months ago I was given a lovely Plextor PX-712SA DVD writer.
> But it has a Serial SATA interface, and my motherboard is way too old to
> have SATA, and I have not planned to change the motherboard before about
> 3 years (it's only 4 years old currently), so I would need a little SATA
> add-on card so I can get the DVD drive going.
> 
> Problem: after doing some reading here and there on the net, it seems
> that SATA cards are primarily designed to handle hard drives, and people
> only ever mention using hard drives on them.  I have never found someone
> saying he  plugged an optical drive on their SATA cards.
> Also, I had a look at Adaptec web site for their entry level SATA cards,
> and again it's not clear. They just keep talking of hard drive, but
> never make any explicit mention of support for optical drives.
> I am not that rich so I can't exactly afford to buy some SATA card just
> to realise that the DVD drive doesn't work.
> 
>>From past message of someone on this list, I know that this particular
> drive does work fine in Ubuntu Hoary, using the Intel ICH5 SATA
> controller. But I understand that this is part of the motherboard
> chipset, which doesn't help in the case at hand, as I need a
> stand-alone/add-on card to plug in a PCI slot.
> 
> So to the point (better late than never ;-).... does anybody has success
> using any CD/DVD writer/player suing an add-on SATA card ? What card is
> that, what chip does it use ? Did it work out of the box in Ubuntu ? If
> not, how hard is it to get working ?
> 
> Thank you so very much in advance, as I am getting frustrated to see
> that nice drive sitting there, unused :o(
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> --
> Vince
> 
>