Serial ATA Hard Disk Drives under Linux
Hi!
I recently bought a server with a Serial ATA HDD. The drive is directly attached to the motherboard by a Serial ATA cable. My question is, how do I configure my linux kernel / system to use the HDD as a Serial ATA drive rather than as a regular ATA drive ? I saw some people saying that you must configure the SCSI emulation. But I think Serial ATA should be transparently compatible with all ATA drivers. Shouldn't it ? Another question : Once my system is up and running, How can I Know if I'm using my HDD as a Serial ATA drive or as a regular ATA drive ? Is it shown in hdparm information ? or in dmesg ? I haven't found any FAQ nor HOWTO about Serial ATA in Linux. Thanks in advance. Cheers, Teresa. |
Quote:
If your SATA drive is connected using a SATA cable to the SATA controller you are using it "as a SATA" drive. Serial-ATA is really a variant of traditional parallell ATA and includes in extension to the ATA command set a new set of SCSI-like commands. I believe no single chip supports the full SATA command set as of yet but we will probably see new controller chips soon that take full advantage of the SATA-specific features. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
As long as you don't use a SATA-to-PATA connector (a device you attach between the SATA controller and the drive itself) you will be using SATA. Quote:
There probably are a couple of FAQs out there but for now it's all dependent on your controller chip. Use google.com/linux to search for information about the chipset you're using and the kernel version or distribution you intend to use. I have my NF7-Sr2 running Gentoo off of a Seagate 160GB SATA drive using the 2.6.2 kernel drivers, which works....OK. Not great at all - I get device timeouts for hdg (which isn't there in the first place) but that's easily solved by appending a <device>=disable parameter to the kernel command line, and performance is downright horrible. But it works, and I'll try libata as soon as I can as I've heard lots of good things about it, especially performance-wise. Håkan |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 06:21 AM. |