Do I own an unsupported optical IDE drive?

[Horace Dynamite <horace.dynamite@gmail.com>]

I have a lot of ATA link errors in my dmesg,
; ---- BEGIN ----
[318539.569748] ata2: exception Emask 0x73 SAct 0x0 SErr 0xffffffff
action 0xe frozen
[318539.569751] ata2: irq_stat 0xffffffff, unknown FIS 00000000
00000000 00000000 00000000, host bus
[318539.569756] ata2: SError: { RecovData RecovComm UnrecovData
Persist Proto HostInt PHYRdyChg PHYInt CommWake 10B8B Dispar BadCRC
Handshk LinkSeq TrStaTrns UnrecFIS DevExch }
[318539.569765] ata2: hard resetting link
[318541.100038] ata1: failed to resume link (SControl FFFFFFFF)
;---- END ----

... It goes on for a very long time, these errors are actually all I
can see in my dmesg.

I can't mount ISO's, I think this is because my optical drive is not
supported (well, the IDE interface must be using a weird chipset)

My kernel is 2.6.32-5-amd64.

Am I right in thinking this implies my optical drive is not supported?
My current optical drive has an IDE interface, using this Ultra DMA
stuff on an Abit AB9 motherboard. I thought I should get a SATA drive,
does this seem reasonable (my SATA disk drives work flawlessly with
the SATA interface)?

Thank you for your time,

Horace.