Mixing SATA and SCSI disks

[Sorin Srbu]

Marcelino Mata <> scribbled on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 12:39 AM:

RHEL3 on all my machines having an nforce-chipset (with sata) have needed
handson-fixes. RHEL3 with intel-chipsets (and sata) works out of the box here.

Intel+sata+scsi works fine but you might have to tweak the bios in order to
set it to something rhel can recognise. I've had recent problems with
installing RHEL4u3 on three machines using sata cdrom and scsi-disks. The
isntaller recognises scsi fine, but is sensitive to how sata is emulated/set
in bios.

My findings, IIRC, was to set the bios to use ahci/sata but emulate ide (all
ide does not work, and neither does all-sata). This is also a known problem
with Asus mobos in combination with phoenix-bioses IIRC.

Newer releases of RHEL may have had this fixed, don't know for sure. CentOS5
installs fine in VMWare with sata emulation I think.


> I have some RHEL3 boxes that I can not upgrade.  I wanted to add SATA
> controller to one of them and use it for cheap expansion (non-critical
> data).  I know with some other RHEL3 boxes with Nvidia NForce SATA
> controller (sata_nv), I could not mix SCSI and SATA drives.
> 
> Does anyone know if this problem is limited to certain SATA chipsets or
> 2.4 kernel in general?  Is it possible to mix SATA and SCSI drives?
> 
> I am thinking of mixing sil3114 based controller (sata_sil) with system
> with HP SCSI RAID controller (cciss).