Your experiences with S-ATA drives?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 05:50, Peter Boy wrote:
> I'm considering to buy S-ATA drives for my new FC3/FC4 machine, but I'm
> wondering whether I might run in endless trouble with them. There are so
> many reports here about problems to get FC 3/4 even installed.
> 
> I consider to buy: Shuttle SN95, AMD 64 nForce3 Ultra with internal S-
> ATA Raid 0, 1, 0+1 (the one, where S-ATA is supposed to work)
> 
> I would like to use 2 drives in a Raid 1 (mirroring) configuration.
> 
> Can someone report success with this kind of configuration (and perhaps
> give some hints about installation issues?)
> 
> Thanks in advance
> Peter

I think SATA support is more of an issue with the controller chips on
your motherboard than with the drives themselves.  The motherboard in
one system I have has two different SATA controller chip sets.  The
Silicon 3114R chipset worked no problem.  The other chip set I think is
an Intel 82801FR/FRW (ICH6R/ICH6RW) SATA controller was not able to see
the Maxtor drives I had installed.  I suspect the problem was during the
initial detection of the drives, it was timing out.  I have subsequently
found an option in the BIOS that disables the quick scan.  That may have
resolved that problem but I have not had the system opened up again to
try putting a drive on that controller again.

I was able to install FC3 in that system using only SATA hard drives off
of the Silicon 3114R controller. 

At the time I was told to avoid using SATA DVD or CD drives as support
for those was not matured.  So I do have an IDE DVD burner that I used
to boot from CD with to load the system.

Have not used this in a RAID configuration so I can not comment on that
except to say that most of the advice I have read says to use the linux
software raid tools instead of the hardware raid support that most
chipsets allow.

 
-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

The 80's -- when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy.