FC2 and Serial ATA

[Japheth Cleaver]

At 11:39 AM 8/6/2004, Jon Shorie wrote:
>We are in the process of upgrading some of our servers.  I am interested in
>adding some serial ata drives into machines that currently are running
>ATA100.
>
>I have read some comments on this list concerning problems with serial ata 
>and
>fc2.  I do not plan on booting off the SATA drives, just using them for
>additional data storage.
>
>The motherboards are all KM400 based.  Most are DFI KM400 with onboard serial
>ata as well as standard ata 100/133.
>
>What I really need to know is this:
>
>1.  What (if any) are the problems with serial ata drives in fc2
>2.  Will I get around these problems by just using them for storage and not
>for booting or running programs?
>3.  What is the likelihood of these problems being fixed in fc3?
>4.  Are there any issues with using large >132GB hard drives in fc2 (either
>ATA100 or SATA)?


Greetings,

We're using Biostar M7VIZ (v5.1) boards here 
(http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=m7viz), with VIA KM400 and 
VT8237 chipsets.


1) The basic issues we've seen are:

  - Onboard SATA RAID is not recognized, FC2 sees them as two separate 
drives. You can do software RAID just fine, but have to deal with the 
standard IDE software-RAID issues of handling the MBR and /boot partition 
(if any)

  - Phoenix/AwardBIOS (for me, YMMV) does not have a boot option for SATA. 
But if there are no other boot drives available, it WILL boot off the SATA 
drives.

     * this creates a problem with you've got, say, a 3ware RAID card in 
the system, but want to boot off of an on-board connected SATA drive. The 
3ware card will be seen as the "scsi" adapter and be selected before the 
on-board SATA is.

  - if you have a standard IDE drive in the system (/dev/hd[a-d] = 
HDD-[0-3]), that will be booted off first (again, I think this is a BIOS 
more than chipset issue).

  - generally, if you're going to use on-board SATA, don't use IDE too.


2) Using SATA for storage should work fine. They show up as /dev/hd{e,g} 
for me, although I've had two installs recently be recognized as 
/dev/sd{a,b}, which I'm still trying to track down the cause of. Did 
something change in a recent update?


3) No idea if progress has been made in FC3.


4) No issues with large drives that I can tell. We've booted 200 GB drives 
off onboard SATA with no problems, and have a 1.5 TB 3Ware 8506-8-based 
volume on a system up now too.



Hope this helps,

Japheth "J.C." Cleaver
cleaver at rohan.sdsu.edu
cleaver at ixpres.net