so it seems that there are some regressions in SuSE's SATA support for me.
Things are not always as them seem. The SATA drivers in 9.2 are just a snapshot of the ones that were in the vanilla kernel at the time the release was frozen (there are some small exceptions to this, but in general it's true) As I said this stuff is still all in development, and when things are developed and still fresh there are regressions now and then. You'll need to live with that for now. If new vanilla works better then the next SUSE release should too (assuming there are no new regressions again or the regressions are caught in time) Another issue is that motherboard and BIOS vendors often add bugs and quirks when they integrate chips, so it's often the case that even when there is a generic chipset driver for a specific chip available the bug workarounds needed to get the devices on a particular mainboard actually running may not be in yet etc. Problems can also be caused by poor cabling or other hardware issues. For example a newer driver may drive a HD more aggressively and then cause a marginary setup that barely worked before to fall over (this problem is fortunately much less severe in SATA than it was in PATA) -Andi