up onto it. Anyway, for the time being I'm recommending to the Linux users I support to avoid SATA drives/controllers if you can help it, until things settle down a bit and the drivers catch up.
I second that motion. SATA is a nightmare on linux right now (up to and including FC4). I fought with a SiI 3112 card on and off for the past 6 months trying to get it to work with no luck. See the very relevant:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=128180
In fact, there are tons of bugzillas on problems with nearly every imaginable SATA chipset out there. Not a good sign. The most common chip, the SiI 3112, is total garbage and seems to have issues with every modern distro except Ubuntu.
If I had to do SATA right now, I'd only attempt it with Intel's onboard ICH and a very new distro. Hopefully FC5 will be better in this regard.
PS: the reason the SiI works on older distros is they used the monolithic IDE driver instead of the libata/sata_sil driver. The integrated driver works fine supposedly; the sata_sil driver has issues. Ubuntu is probably using the older method, or has some patch to work around the interrupt problem.