There are SiImage fixes in the upcomming 2.4.22 kernel, and the -ac tree has a few improvements.

I have a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV and got following values with hdparm -tT

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1120 MB in 2.00 seconds = 560.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 100 MB in 3.00 seconds = 33.33 MB/sec

I guess SATA speeds should be much bigger.

I have an asus p4c800 deluxe. I've been trying to get my maxtor 120 gig sata drive to run. Mandrake 9.1 doesn't see it, while the standard gentoo kernel sees it and crashes just after that.

Has anyone had any luck with this board?

I have the same problem and configuration, but with Red Hat 9.
I have installed it setting the BIOS Ide settings to Compatible mode, but then you loose one IDE channel.
I'm trying to get RH9 to recognize SATA drive when BIOS settings is Enhanced.

Regards,
Pedro

Pedro: Have you tried using a non Red Hat stock kenrel, one from www.kernel.org? I am currently using the lattest stable release, 2.4.22 and I must say that I'm impressed. I don't personally have a computer with a SATA RAID chipset, but a frend of mine has one (an NForce2) I tried this kenrel on that computer and the results were very impressive... The performance we got was that of a normal IDE ATA 100 drive (using hdparm -tT, the disk buffered read got to 35-41 Mb/sec), and all we did was to compile into the kenrel the Silicon Image IDE chipset driver. So you may want to try compiling that baby.

There's a little detail that has been missed here. The p4c800 doesn't use the Sil chip. It has the intel ICH5 chip which has 2 sata ports in addtion to the 2 ide controllers.

Again, has anyone had any success on getting an ICH5 running under linux in enhanced mode? (I really need enhanced cause I have an ide drive, a dvd and a burner in addition to the sata drive)

I'm getting close to getting this working, but have hit a dead end.

I am running 2.4.22 under RH9. I have added the rc.sysinit echo entry and have created the harddiskhde file.

When I boot up, everything seems to be recognized, but locks up when "Finding Module Dependencies:" prints out during boot.

Forgot to mention: Mobo is P4P800 with ICH5.

What are the specific .config options that need to be tweeked for the kernel compile? Maybe I missed something during make xconfig?

Thanks...

Dear all,

I was facing problems with the drivers for the Promise RAID controllers PDC 20276 and PDC 20376. The latter one also supports serial ATA (SATA). I was complaining at both companies SuSE and Promise. SuSE gave me one of those lousy "nice that you wrote but we don't really care" standard emails, while Promise sent me new drivers AND the (Open) sources !!!
You can download them from:
http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~hp3/share/Promise/

I haven't tested them yet since at present the old one is running and I do not want to risc to kill the server again prior to having installed it on my private PC.
I hope that this will help. The previous driver works well, yet when I installed the Athlon-kernel security patch from SuSE (for SuSE Linux 8.1 at least) it broke down after reboot. The reason for this remains obscure to me and I got no helpful comment (as you may have guessed) from SuSE (as it is a *RAID* controller which is not supported by SuSE-support) nor from my Google-searches.

Let me know what you think.

hdparm -d1 /dev/

- enables UDMA. The main thing you must do (SATA uses dma right?).

Lots of other tweaks too but I can't help with a drive as good as yours (I have 20gb .

How is Serial ATA support under 2.6 now?

I posted this to 'SATA on an ASUS P4C800' thread:

I finally got it working BUT with the intel ICH5 controller, not the Promise controller; I'm not using RAID and don't mind, but don't know if that's your case.

I connected a Maxtor 120 GB to the ICH5 connector, changed the BIOS Ide settings to Compatible mode and installed RH9. After upgrading through RH network to the latest kernel release, 2.4.20-20.9smp, I could change the BIOS setting to Enhanced mode and reboot without problems.

I had to edit the /etc/fstab file to adjust the new letter assigned to the disk in the swap partition entry (it changed from hdc2 to hde2).

Regards,
Pedro

FYI : Silicon Image just released a Linux Driver yesterday.

SiI3x12: Serial ATA (SATA) Linux RAID Driver - Released 3. September 2003

I just installed a server with a D845PEBT2 Intel motherboard - with 2xSegate 80GB SATA drives in RAID 1 - and it rocks with RedHat 9.0......

Get the driver here : DRIVER

you have to go to the left frame and choose
=> Downloads
=> Drivers
=> SiI3x12
=> SiI3x12: Serial ATA (SATA) Linux RAID Driver - Released
and download the driver
The zipfile contains detailed information about how to install Redhat 7.3 -> 9.0 and SuSe 8.0 and 8.1 with the controller......

soo have fun

BAH

where's the opensource driver!

there is a medley driver think I've posted it b4..

Post performance with this driver, please. With the Open Sourced driver included in 2.4.22 I get:
[edit]
Forgot to mention that this was on an ASUS A7N8X Delux V. 2.0 motherboard, Red Hat 9, tow Seagate barracuda (one 80GB and the other 120GB) PIO mode sadly is @ 16-bits.

is the new driver in the kernel for raid array only? or for the actualy controller?

I assume u are not using raid on your drives..

thanks