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Old 6th December 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP View Post
All of mine are EIDE, so i can't comment on CD/DVD drives. I do know that SATA hard drives work *perfect* on FreeBSD 6.0 Release through the last 7-Stable. The only issue I've experienced is the ATA_STATIC_ID option in kernels causes my first (and only) SATA drive to be detected as ad4 and without the option it detects the drive as ad0.
That's not a bug, that's the nature of how the BIOS numbers drives and how the kernel interprets the numbers.

The BIOS numbers all the IDE controllers before the SATA controllers.

If you use ATA_STATIC_ID, then the numbering of your {P|S}ATA devices will be determined by the port they are connected to, and will not change if you add/remove drives. The master IDE controller will be ad0 and ad1, the secondary IDE controller will be ad2 and ad3. The first SATA port will be ad4, the next SATA port ad5, and so on. If you only have 1 SATA device plugged into first SATA port, with no IDE devices, it will always be called ad4. Add an IDE device to the primary master controller and it will be called ad0, and the SATA will still be called ad4. Add an IDE device to secondary master, and it will be called ad2, the other IDE device still ad0, and the SATA device still ad4.

If you don't use ATA_STATIC_ID, then the numbering of your {P|S}ATA devices will be determined by the order that the kernel detects them. If you have no IDE devices and 1 SATA device, then that device will show as ad0. If you add an IDE device, it will show as ad0 and the SATA device becomes ad2. Add another IDE device, and everything gets renumbered again.

So, it all depends on how you want your devices to appear (consistent based on port, or consecutively numbered starting at 0).
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