Sequence of SATA Devices

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, harald.schwier at freenet.de wrote:

> Hello,
>
>>> I'm using Fedora Core 3, Kernel 2.6.12, with two Promise SATA Controllers.
>>> One 4 port onboard Promise controller and one 2 port Promise PCIController.
>>> The Kernel detects the PCI controller first and names the attached drive sda
>>> and sdb.
>>> The drives attached to the onboard controller are named sdc to sdf.
>>
>> The current thinking is that the sdX names should be avoided, e.g., in
>> fstab, so that even if you add and remove drives the remaining partitions get mounted
>> in the same place.
>
> The drives are not mounted.
>
>>> Is it possible to change this behaviour so that the drives attached to the
>>> onboard controller are recognised first?
>>
>> Why do you care?
>
> The machine performs disk dumps from one drive to x drives. The master-drive
> must always be sda. The onboard controller is much faster then the pci controller
> thus it should be used first.

The pci controller sounds broken, and software that insists that a
particular drive is always sda seems overly rigid.  If you could use
more flexible names, you could create symbolic links, e.g.,
/dev/source -> /dev/sdX, /dev/target1 -> /dev/sdY, etc. (perhaps using
the S.M.A.R.T. info to track which drive ends up where).

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>