Your experiences with S-ATA drives?

Tarjei Knapstad tarjei.knapstad at predichem.com
Thu Jun 23 10:35:36 UTC 2005


On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 11:50, 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.
> 

SATA in RAID configurations is generally not a good idea for installing
linux on. I don't know how well the RAID controller integrated in the
nForce 3 chipset is supported though. If it's softraid like Intels
ICHR-5/6 solutions then just forget it.

It's possible to get things up and running using Heinz Mauelshagen
dmraid stuff (http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/readme) but I
doubt it'll be worth the pain. I've been able to mount and access my
ICHR5 partitions from a FC3 install on a separate PATA disk using
dmraid, so it is doable, but it involves a lot more than popping a CD
into the drive and start installing (I think you would have to install
from an already working linux install after you've mounted your RAID
partitions).

I think your best bet would be to buy a proper RAID controller that's
supported (from Promise, 3Ware or others), but then again I guess
there's only so much hardware that'll fit inside that Shuttle.

Another possibility could be to turn off the RAID stuff in the BIOS and
have the disks act as normal SATA drives and then use linux softraid for
redundancy.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though

--
Tarjei




More information about the fedora-list mailing list