I haven't run into any of these file system issues, and I've got one system that's been running for a month now without having to reboot it. As for switching to ATA, I say lets go for it. There's still a fall back for those systems that may not work with it, but the laptop I have that wasn't working with the IDE driver was fixed over a year ago and now works fine with either. One of the issues I can see though holding up the Alpha would be the fix to wchar. This affects many of the Optional Packages, so we would need time to make another pass back through them. How long this would take I'n not sure. I would think we assign certain packages to people and get through them in under a week though, luckily we've been posting port logs for most of them on haiku-ports so it should be easy, just need to rebuild them. Just let us know when the fix is put into place and we'll start rebuilding the packages. -scottmc