Hello, I was thinking of upgrading to a Western Digital raptor hd. My MB is older and does not support SATA. I was wondering if anybody has tried using an add on controller (PCI card) in Mandrake 10.1. . I want to be able to boot to the SATA so I can run Linux and windows on it and use my old IDE drives for storage. I also am curios if this set up will get along with my IDE hard drives. My whole setup is AX34 Pro II Mother board, Pentium III coppermine, ATI Radeon 8500, 1 20 gig Samsung IDE hard drive and a Maxtor 40 gig. Any help would be great thanks. Also how does Linux recognize SATA drive IE-/dev/sda1 or what?

Thanks, Jake

I don't think it will be a problem if you get a good controller card. The ones from Promise Technology state they are compatible with linux:

http://www.promise.com/product/pdquide_eng.asp

If your not interested in doing a raid configuration, it should just work in a recent linux distro, certainly in mdk 10.1. In fact, your likely to have more trouble getting windows installed on it. That's what I found when I upgraded my mb with an on board(intel) sata controller. I wound up leaving windows on my old pata drive because of the hassle.
Re how sata drives are designated in linux, that depends on the kernel. All the recent 2.6 kernels designate sata drives as scsi hard drives, i.e. /dev/sdxx. The older 2.6 kernels designated them as /dev/hdex. There was a lot of kernel work on sata over the past year and I would definitely go with the newer 2.6 kernels; sata support is greatly improved by the newer kernels. All the current releases of the big distros(mandrake, suse, fedora) are using 2.6 kernels that designate sata drives as sdxx.

Sweet, thank you for your time