[mythtv-users] S-ATA versus plain old parallel

[Emmanuel Hislen]

Hi,


Before rushing and buying a SATA drive do some homework and make sure the
combination of SATA controller on your motherboard and the SATA drive has
been reportedly working.


For example it took me two weeks to get my Seagate SATA Barracuda 160 Gb to
work properly with my Abit AN7 motherboard which uses the Silicon Image
controller.

First the drive did not come with DMA. It came in pio mode, at 1.3 MB/s
(pathetic).
Then enabling DMA with hdparm crashed the box + data corruption/loss.
Going from RH 9.0 latest update to FC 1 fixed the DMA issue, but I was still
getting only 25 MB/s (hdparm -Tt), less than any decent ATA drive (my old
one was around 31 MB/s).
Tuning some parameters I am now getting 55 MB/s, and it seems to be stable.
Knock on wood...


I had the following feedback on the linux kernel list about SATA
controllers:

> My suggestions for the best SATA interface chips, in terms of
> performance and stability, based on my experiences, are:
>
> 1. Intel ICH-5
> 2. Promise SATA 150TX2 etc
> 3. Silicon Image
> 4. HighPoint (These are all PATA+Marvel Bridge adapters)


For example, I have come to learn that even in 2.6.1 kernel, libdata has a
black list of Seagate drives for which the throughput is severely throttled.
There is no tuning possible for those drives. Mine isn't one of them I must
be lucky somehow...
So beware that SATA and linux is still a bleeding edge in some cases.

Good luck,


Emmanuel.


-----Message d'origine-----
De : mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org]De la part de Chris Petersen
Envoyé : Monday, February 02, 2004 12:48 AM
À : Discussion about mythtv
Objet : Re: [mythtv-users] S-ATA versus plain old parallel


> BTW I'm looking at an Intel D865GLC board and potentially a 200GB Maxtor
> being fed from my nice shiny new Hauppauge 350.

If you have the cash, go with SATA - drive makers will stop making PATA
drives in the next few years, and with the smaller cable, the inside of
your case will look great (if you want a tip, coil the SATA cable
tightly around a pencil or something similar to shape it - it'll turn
into something resembling a phone handset cord, and looks pretty cool)

As for speed, etc - you're going overkill if you're also including a
pvr-350.  but it'll be a SWEET system, especially if you get a
hyperthreaded proc.

As the others said, you shouldn't have any issues with SATA support if
you use a recent kernel (redhat 9 and up, for that flavor).

--
Chris Petersen
Programmer / Web Designer
Silicon Mechanics:  http://www.siliconmechanics.com/
Blade Servers:      http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c292/blade-server.php
1U Servers:         http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c272/1u-server.php


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