Thanks for the response Jeff !

Jeff Garzik wrote:

Alpha should not be operationally much different from other little 
endian 64-bit platforms.

The PCI swizzle might be weird (what is your Alpha platform?), is the 
only Alpha-specific thing that comes to mind.

I am using a DS20  (Tsunami / Goldrush).

quoted

I have similar such behavior before when using drivers that generate 
many unaligned accesses - I only have seen 2 places they occur in 
sata_sil24 and have fixed them myself, but that made no difference.

We definitely want to fix all these you find.  Please post more info...

In sil24_config_port, the writel's for /* zero error counters */ should 
be writew's - they are 16bit control registers.
Only PORT_DECODE_ERR_THRESH and PORT_CRC_ERR_THRESH appear to be 
unaligned, but why risk a stl when a stw (on platforms that support it) 
can be used.

Also, if you are highly motivated, I would love to see if other SATA 
cards have similar problems on Alpha...

I'll need to find a computer store with a decent return policy, but I 
would consider doing it ....

...tom