atacontrol

atacontrol is a useful little command that will tell you a little about the IDE (ata) devices you have attached to your computer. For instance:

$ atacontrol list

will list all the IDE devices attached to your computer. It talkes about the 'channel', which is usually at least 0 and 1. When I do it on my computer, I get:

$ atacontrol list
ATA channel 0:
Master:  ad0  ATA/ATAPI rev 4
Slave:   ad1  ATA/ATAPI rev 5
ATA channel 1:
Master: acd0 <4X4X32/3.VR> ATA/ATAPI rev 0
Slave:       no device present

Then you can set and adjust parameters for the various channels and devices. See the man page for more info.

FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: atacontrol