[ILUG] Hardware queries

[Rafiq_Maniar at Dell.com]

In my experience, I've seen Maxtor and Fujitsu fail an awful lot more
than Seagate ones - especially Maxtor. No concrete figures
for you or anything, thats just what I've observed.

I've never replaced a failed SATA drive BUT thats at least contributed
to by the fact that they're not in as wide usage as PATA drives,
and of course they haven't been in the field as long either.

I'm currently using a 120gb SATA drive on my Optiplex GX270 here, using
the onboard controller and it was detected fine with RHEL3 and FC1.
Can't say I've run bonnie or anything to test it, but it seems to work
without any difficulty. It uses the ata_piix driver.

I also have a Promise S150 TX2 add-in PCI SATA card (which performs
'hardware' RAID), and that took a little bit more work. The only
distribution that appears to have proper drivers for this card at
installation time is Fedora Core 2. It then uses the sata_promise driver
according to the installation screen. You can also download the source
for the driver from the Promise website to use with any other
distribution at install time (compile on another similar machine, copy
to floppy, insmod during installation), but there are binary-only
components to it too. 

So regarding SATA support, you just need to figure out which controller
you want to buy and then have a look on the net and see if it
works under Linux.

Hope this helps,
Rafiq

-----Original Message-----
From: kevin [mailto:kevin at cybercolloids.net]
Sent: 14 July 2004 09:02
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: [ILUG] Hardware queries


We have just had a hard drive die. Now for some of you with major
datacentres 
this seems to be a regular occurence but for small fish like us its that

first harddrive I have lost since I dropped that 80mb hard drive on the 
concrete floor about 10 years ago. So a couple of questions:

1. What manufacturer do people recommend for IDE drives? The drive that
died 
was actually one of our newest drives and was a Maxtor, the other ones
we 
have are Seagate and Fujitsu. The system is not complex, no raid or LVM,
just 
a hard drive with a spare backed up by rsync hourly. 40GB would be
plenty big 
enough and its not very heavily loaded.

2. What are SATA drives like on Linux? Are they fully compatible?

Thanks

Kevin.
-- 
Irish Linux Users' Group
http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/