Does someone knows an easy and quick way (without recompiling or patching the kernel) for enabling 32 bit access, DMA and other useful settings to SATA hard drive and SATA DVD drive? On such a drives hdparm fails to set any option, because it can't recognise ioctl.

If I remember correctly, sata drives don't use or don't need dma. That is why hdparm won't work on them. Are you having problems with drive access speed or something? If not I wouldn't worry about it.

As tommcd said, you should not be doing that. There is a sdparm utility for SCSI devices, but I never use it, so can't really comment on that.

However, there are some situations, where there is a need to manually do something for DVD RW. For example, for my Dell Inspirion 640m, I need to add: "combined_mode=libata atapi_enable=1" into lilo.conf (I use lilo, I think most people use grub) in order to get good performance. But, this is what I had encountered, which maybe completely different from your situation. If you really having some problem with your SATA devices, you should give us more details on what exactly the devices and the problem you are facing. Otherwise, I am not sure if anyone can help.

Well, you are right about DMA mode, but not for 32 bit access. I searched in Internet about this problem and many people are on the same road. Most of them use libata patch: http://www.linconsult.no/libata/

In this page is written: "Note: this whole issue has been fixed in kernel 2.6.15", which is still not true.


P.S. ghostdancer, I tried sdparm, it is not working with SATA drives. I think hdparm developers must improve SATA support, it is a shame - SATA drives are here for 4 years

Output of sdparm:

sdparm /dev/sda

/dev/sda: ATA ST3320620AS 3.AA
REQUEST SENSE failed, try again with '-v' option

sdparm -v /dev/sda

/dev/sda: ATA ST3320620AS 3.AA
Request Sense cmd: 03 00 00 00 40 00
request sense: Fixed format, current; Sense key: Illegal Request
Additional sense: Invalid command operation code
REQUEST SENSE failed


Output of hdparm:

hdparm /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 38913/255/63, sectors = 625142448, start = 0

hdparm -c3 /dev/sda (tried -c1 without success)

/dev/sda:
setting 32-bit IO_support flag to 3
HDIO_SET_32BIT failed: Invalid argument
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2180 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1090.05 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.03 seconds = 55.50 MB/sec

hdparm -d1 /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device


The reason is clear for me - "Inappropriate ioctl for device", SATA drives are not well supported. So I have to use combined_mode=libata atapi_enable=1 in grub (I used primarly lilo till this installation.