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How would one differentiate between a bridged PATA and a true SATA?

It's not really that important, but one way is to examine the drive and look for the Marvel (brand) bridge chip. But some of the higher performing drives I have here use Marvel bridges, so that's not a really useful telltale.

I do know that many of the current (first) generation Maxtor drives are actually PATA inside, because they croak if the driver doesn't program the UDMA mode on startup -- true SATA doesn't even have the concept of a "UDMA mode", except for reporting purposes for older software.

Cheers