implications of SATA and PATA being treated as one single type

jay73 · 05-29-2007, 10:21 PM

More and more distributions are using the same driver for both PATA and SATA drives so that both types are referred to as sd rather than hd on the one hand versus sd on the other. This has made me wonder whether this has an any impact on the maximum number of partitions for PATA disks. It used to be 63 (while only 15 could be recognized on a SATA drive). Is that number still valid or has it been brought down to 15 as well?

syg00 · 05-30-2007, 07:05 PM

I believe the latter.

jay73 · 05-30-2007, 08:24 PM

I thought so myself, it would seem perfectly logical. Unfortunately no-one seems to have any experience with this so I'm going to experiment with this one of the coming days.

Edit: I just found an interesting article that more or less confirms what I thought: IDE-over-libata implies that PATA disks won't any longer be able to hold more than 15 partitions; however, not all distros that have reached the 2.6.20 kernel are implementing this new approach as a default.

archtoad6 · 05-31-2007, 10:26 AM

Except for the fact that I am becoming a believer in LV's rather than partitions, I could go ballistic over this news. The resulting rant would focus on not thinking through the implications of a change & what it may break.

BTW, is there any provision for optionally keeping to "hd" & therefore retaining the 63 part. max.?

syg00 · 05-31-2007, 04:52 PM

I'm a bit ambivalent - I keep wanting to try LVM, but I do a lot of "playing", and ensuring LVM support is in everything will be a serious PITA.
Not to metion recovery from hardware failures ...
Or moving disks between machines ...
mmmm - maybe not.

Currently you have the option to keep the old nomenclature - one assumes this will disappear in time. Similar to the way udev was handled I would think.