SATA cards for CD drives, suggestion ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi,

A few months ago I was given a lovely Plextor PX-712SA DVD writer.
But it has a Serial SATA interface, and my motherboard is way too old to
have SATA, and I have not planned to change the motherboard before about
3 years (it's only 4 years old currently), so I would need a little SATA
add-on card so I can get the DVD drive going.

Problem: after doing some reading here and there on the net, it seems
that SATA cards are primarily designed to handle hard drives, and people
only ever mention using hard drives on them.  I have never found someone
saying he  plugged an optical drive on their SATA cards.
Also, I had a look at Adaptec web site for their entry level SATA cards,
and again it's not clear. They just keep talking of hard drive, but
never make any explicit mention of support for optical drives.
I am not that rich so I can't exactly afford to buy some SATA card just
to realise that the DVD drive doesn't work.

>From past message of someone on this list, I know that this particular
drive does work fine in Ubuntu Hoary, using the Intel ICH5 SATA
controller. But I understand that this is part of the motherboard
chipset, which doesn't help in the case at hand, as I need a
stand-alone/add-on card to plug in a PCI slot.

So to the point (better late than never ;-).... does anybody has success
using any CD/DVD writer/player suing an add-on SATA card ? What card is
that, what chip does it use ? Did it work out of the box in Ubuntu ? If
not, how hard is it to get working ?

Thank you so very much in advance, as I am getting frustrated to see
that nice drive sitting there, unused :o(


Regards,


--
Vince