I got around it just a few seconds back. It seems the BIOS lets one
use the SATA controller in two modes: ATA and AHCI. When I selected
AHCI it seems to work really well but not when set to ATA.

I did not have issues with FreeBSD or Windows on it.  I got a little
bit more info here:

http://www.nabble.com/AHCI-support-for-SATA-devices--t742630.html

Thanks.

-D

On 10/9/07, Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 08:52:56AM -0500, Dinesh Nadarajah wrote:
> > I have a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop with an Intel T7500 processor. When I
> > tried to install NetBSD 4.0RC2 on it, it was so slow. When it was formatting
> > the hard drive, I could not even see the HD activity light. I though it
> > might be an issue with the laptop hardware. So I installed FreeBSD 6.2 on it
> > to test and it screamed. The formatting was very fast and the HD activity
> > light also was fine. Is there a possibility that NetBSD 4.0RC2 does not have
> > the SATA drivers or any other driver that might be affecting this? Anyone
> > else encounter such problems? I will try to get more data regarding the
> > hardware.
>
> It could be that the IDE drive is used in PIO mode, yes. Can you post the
> dmesg here ?
>
>
> --
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
>      NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
> --
>