I run SCSI drives, but my new mobo natively supports sata so I'm thinking of purchasing a large sata drive (maybe 1TB or so) that I can play with, use for storage of videos, etc.

Well, I am wondering about the reliability of these large drives. There is something rattling in my brain from last fall about a problem with compatibility with Linux in someone's 1TB drive, or perhaps it was just some common failure of the drive...I don't recall exactly.

I'm researching it now, but I think soliciting opinions is useful. So, would anyone here who is running a large sata drive with Linux care to comment on how well they like it, what the issues are, etc?

I have a 200GB internal sata drive + USB 500GB drive and linux has no trouble with it.

Hi,

Standard setup: 2 x 500G and 2 x 750G. Occasionally an external 1T Drive. Haven't had any problems yet.

The external disk connects by firewire 800, but initial tests show it also works (but not so fast) with usb 2.0.

Internal drives won't be a problem, external drives might have their own software/driver that does/doesn't support linux. Also some external drives are packaged as being 1T, but are actually 2 x 500G (could be a good/bad thing, depending). Do keep an eye out for stuff like that.

Hope this helps.

Those 4 disks have been running for 3,4,5 years going backwards in order of size.
No problems other than one ST3500641AS that was DOA. I bought a pair at the time, and one has been ok. That's why I changed to the 750GB Samsung on the last purchase.
I'm still wary of 1TB drives, and even more so of 2TB drives. That's a lot of data to risk, and a lot of backup space needed.

1TB is still actually 0.99TB which should not cause any problems yet, however once you go beyond the 0.99TB to perhaps 1.5TB your drive would probably be utilizing the new 4KB format, so some tweaking with fdisk would be needed for efficiency and such. I know some threads in LQ (Slackware) has already addressed this issue, but this also concerns the Western Digital drives (Green?). I don't know if other brand of drives with 1TB+ also recommend the 4KB sector format.

Just something to consider if you do purchase such a drive with that amount of capacity.

I have 6 x 1TB SATA in my main computer, 5 Samsung Spinpoints and 1 WD Caviar Black. The Spinpoints have been in use for over two years, the WD is about a year old. WD Green drives are noticeably slower as they run at 5400RPM, not 7200. WD Black is slightly faster than Spinpoints but it is also noticeably louder (I have since discovered they are faster because they have a default acoustic value of 254 (hdparm -M), which means better performance but more noise - after setting them to the same value as the Spinpoints, the noise level is about equal but so is the performance).

That might have been me. If it was, I'll point out that the drive in question developed problems only after I dropped it. It was replaced with the WD drive mentioned above (the shop was willing to replace it but they were out of spinpoints).
I think if you're buying drives that large, you should get them in pairs if you care about back-ups. Too much work scraping together backup space from any smaller drives you already have.

I run a 1 TB drive and haven't had any problems thus far. It was cheaper than a 300GB drive which is actually what I inteded to buy. On the other hand, I haven't had it long enough to say anything about longevity. Just that I haven't had any issues using it.

Running 2 x 1TB RAID setup (7400RPM Samsung drives IIRC). Performance is good and so far no problems whatsoever, but like damgar I really can't give you any info on longevity since I've only had this setup running for 6 months.

Well, I guess the "answer" so far is that they are working OK with Linux. I have noticed some slow drives available; can't imagine why anyone would want one of those. I want fast drives.

But, to just get one to play with...

I think I'll wait until Fry's has a sale...