OT: Serial ATA

OT: Serial ATA

[Paulo Andre]

I have to build a new firewall and the salesman is trying to sell me Serial 
ATA as part of the solution.
Has anyone used this, because I have heard that Serial ATA is not up to spec?

Paulo

Re: OT: Serial ATA

[Joel Newkirk]

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 02:40, Paulo Andre wrote:
> I have to build a new firewall and the salesman is trying to sell me Serial 
> ATA as part of the solution.
> Has anyone used this, because I have heard that Serial ATA is not up to spec?
> 
> Paulo

I have an Asus mobo with VIA chipset that includes SATA.  I'm delighted
with the performance.

HOWEVER...

Until a distro is released that has SATA drivers on the install media it
is exceptionally difficult to actually install Linux to the SATA drive. 
I ended up needing to install to my old IDE drive, build a 2.6.0 kernel,
mount the SATA drive and prep it, transfer all partitions from the old
drive to the SATA, then install Grub on the SATA drive.

The short of it: make DAMN sure that if you go the SATA-only route that
the SATA chipset is supported by 2.4.2x kernels that are used by
installers, or be prepared for a long tortuous process getting it up and
running.  

SATA is great, IMHO, but support for it under Linux is not sufficient
for worry-free installs, YET... With the final release of kernel 2.6.0
last week, I expect that to change in the near future for many
distributions.  (although not RedHat, of course :( and Fedora is on a
scheduled release cycle, so I don't anticipate it there for a few months
either)

j

Re: OT: Serial ATA

[enigma]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 09:40:41AM +0200, Paulo Andre wrote:
> I have to build a new firewall and the salesman is trying to sell me Serial 
> ATA as part of the solution.
> Has anyone used this, because I have heard that Serial ATA is not up to spec?

Not sure SATA has anything to do with a firewall box.  Unless you are
doing a lot of logging, you don't need enhanced performance on the IDE
bus, do you?

If you were building a file/application server, SATA on something like
the 3Ware cards is nice, but still a bit overrated ATM.

Cheers,
Ed