No subject

   Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both
   Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers in
   drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work
   correctly because libata doesn't yet support the needed
   ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer,
   says that this support will be added to libata in the future. When
   this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new
   SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk
   to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the
   BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver
   doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller
   doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be
   used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is
   Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work

   Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be
   used with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux
   kernel mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is
   included in the libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent
   Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven by a libata
   driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the device
   type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for
   example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under
   development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is
   idle before trying smartmontools.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul