We are in the process of upgrading some of our servers. I am interested in adding some serial ata drives into machines that currently are running ATA100.
I have read some comments on this list concerning problems with serial ata and
fc2. I do not plan on booting off the SATA drives, just using them for
additional data storage.
The motherboards are all KM400 based. Most are DFI KM400 with onboard serial ata as well as standard ata 100/133.
What I really need to know is this:
1. What (if any) are the problems with serial ata drives in fc2 2. Will I get around these problems by just using them for storage and not for booting or running programs? 3. What is the likelihood of these problems being fixed in fc3? 4. Are there any issues with using large >132GB hard drives in fc2 (either ATA100 or SATA)?
Greetings,
We're using Biostar M7VIZ (v5.1) boards here (http://www.biostar-usa.com/mbdetails.asp?model=m7viz), with VIA KM400 and VT8237 chipsets.
1) The basic issues we've seen are:
- Onboard SATA RAID is not recognized, FC2 sees them as two separate drives. You can do software RAID just fine, but have to deal with the standard IDE software-RAID issues of handling the MBR and /boot partition (if any)
- Phoenix/AwardBIOS (for me, YMMV) does not have a boot option for SATA. But if there are no other boot drives available, it WILL boot off the SATA drives.
* this creates a problem with you've got, say, a 3ware RAID card in the system, but want to boot off of an on-board connected SATA drive. The 3ware card will be seen as the "scsi" adapter and be selected before the on-board SATA is.
- if you have a standard IDE drive in the system (/dev/hd[a-d] = HDD-[0-3]), that will be booted off first (again, I think this is a BIOS more than chipset issue).
- generally, if you're going to use on-board SATA, don't use IDE too.
2) Using SATA for storage should work fine. They show up as /dev/hd{e,g} for me, although I've had two installs recently be recognized as /dev/sd{a,b}, which I'm still trying to track down the cause of. Did something change in a recent update?
3) No idea if progress has been made in FC3.
4) No issues with large drives that I can tell. We've booted 200 GB drives off onboard SATA with no problems, and have a 1.5 TB 3Ware 8506-8-based volume on a system up now too.
Hope this helps,
Japheth "J.C." Cleaver
cleaver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cleaver@xxxxxxxxxx
