You are probaly attempting to use hdparm on a SATA or some other bizarre drive. hdparm currently has very limited support for SATA drives however these drives are generally setup automatically to use most of the more decent settings. You should be able to get the basic information (without the -i) and benchmarking to work. Try benchmarking the drive to check if you are getting good speeds (generally above 1000MB for cached reads and above 50MB for buffered reads).
sdparm is virtually the same as hdparm. blktool is an alternatative to hdparm with some support for SATA and SCSI drives.