I have an Intel board (G7ESZ STL2) and a 4 port SATA (software RAID) PCI card. I'm not bothering with the software RAID...I'm just using it to connect my 4 500GB drives.

From the get-go the drives didn't seem to be as fast as they were in their previous box. hdparm -Tt gives me 33MB/s instead of 60-70MB/s.

While booting I get an error: "piix4_smbus illegal interrupt configuration". Is this pointing to my problem or is this board simply not fast enough to support the higher speeds for my drives?

The product manual for the mainboard is here: http://www.intel.com/support/motherb.../stl2/#anchor7

and the PCI SATA card is this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/SIIG/SCSA4M12/

Thanks for any insight!

How do your SATA drives show up? sdx or hdx?

Haven't used slack with sata drives yet. Does is use hdparm or do you need sdparm?

The drives show up as sda, sdb, sdc, and sdd. I should mention that I'm running the latest Ubuntu Server (x32) and that the previous 2 versions of Ubuntu I used (x32 and x64), though on different hardware, showed the same drive letters but reported speeds between 60 and 70 MBps.

The recommendations I found on a google search for your problem suggest you might need to upgrade your kernel. Check the repository and see if you are running the most up to date one.

Note: so far have been unable to find a successful fix.

I decided to quit being cheap and just get a newer board. I couldn't get Ubuntu Server 7.10 to successfully install and the board seemed to have issues with the IDE channel anyway.

I'm more on the software side and was never really sure what kind of board is required to get the faster transfer speeds with SATA or even a gigabit LAN card.

Thanks for the input, though.