[Wolves] SATA HD Questions

[Adam Sweet]

Hi Mo,

I got my Silicon Image 3112 working ok, I had other
problems with the kernel that meant that I couldn't
add it to /etc/fstab and have it mounted at boot time
(I may or may not post about this) but I could mount
it and read it etc. Performance wise I never used it
enough to test whether the performance was ok or not,
I just used it as a big file storage area rather than
an OS partition.

I only have one drive on my SATA channels, so this
should be ok for you.

There is a SATA page at

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

so take a look at that.

Don't go flashing your BIOS just yet, it appears a few
people are having SATA performance probs under 2.6.

A discussion on the Silicon Image problems is at

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3813
and
http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/11/25/73

In particular, from the 2nd link, the guys second post
mentions a libata driver which produces considerably
better performance. Forgive me if I have incorrectly
recalled your SATA chipset.

Otherwise there is a whole load of threads on this
topic on the kernel mailing list, a quick google
brings up the following

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:lkml.org+sata+performance&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&client=firefox-a&start=0&sa=N

I don't think there should be any problems using a
mixture of SATA and PATA drives, assuming I have
interpretted your second question correctly.

Apologies if this email appears disjointed as I have
been researching and reading a lot while writing it.

If I recall correctly and you have a Silicin Image
SATA chipset then this libata driver seems to be the
way forward. How you do this with SuSE I don't know,
with Debian I would just build a new kernel from the
Debian kernel-source, or wait until it is fixed and
then build one with a working Sil module.

Hope that points you in the right direction.

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