ok ive been using slack for years now, and i will admit i was rather comfortable possibly dependent on the way the older hardware(ide agp etc ad infintum) was installed and managed. now everything is sata and pci-e. ok cool time for a new adventure. so how do i go about installing slackware on sata WHILE receiving benefits of sata(speed yadda yadda)i havent really dealt with sata and i would like some advice? the sli installation is easy, so that doesnt really bother me, its more like i am scared to go and invest in a nice system that kicks ass because i dont want to deal with sata, so please someone help me break my bashfullness....

thanks

Sata devices should be recognised just fine by any recent kernel.

Most likely they'll appear as /dev/sdN

Unless you are dealing with onboard raid you should have no problems at all.

The only time I've had any issues with sata is when the installer sees the drive as /dev/hda and the installed systems sees it as /dev/sda. If this is the case just boot with the "hda=noprobe" option or add it to the lilo append line if you need it to be permanent.

In the triply unlikely event that a)you happen to use grub on slack instead of lilo, b)your system happens to combine IDE and SATA hard disks, _and_ c) you happen to want to boot from a SATA drive rather than the IDE one, you'll need to prepared to do a bit of editing as automatic grub configuration will set up the two halves of the chainloader to point to two different drives. The grub drive naming and ordering convention gets in the way. Not really a problem, once you notice what the issue is.

Otherwise, SATA on Slack has been great! Absolutely problem-free.

To get the most features out of SATA, make sure to put the SATA controller in AHCI mode (done in the BIOS settings), that way if the drive supports NCQ then it will actually work.

Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHCI

Some controllers may have problems, but from what I've found most controllers have fewer problems in AHCI mode with the 'ahci' driver.

As for performance, there's not too much difference (other than what NCQ can give you) because most HDDs cannot even come close to the max transfer rate of the SATA interface.

It works fine, straight out of the box. Has done since about Slackware 10.0 in my experience, but probably even earlier.

Just do it.