Hi just I have got a mbo that supports both IDE and SATA. I installed FC2 a year or two ago on the 160G ide drive that came with the box. We've got a bunch of these 80G SATA drives around so I swiped one this morning with the idea to transfer the image from the old IDE to the faster SATA. I'm not sure how to do it. So far I'm not sure how to even find the SATA drive from within FC2? Anybody know how to get this thing recognized and partitioned?

SATA isn't really much quicker unless you regularly have heavy disk usage from multiple drives on a single IDE channel, in which case moving the drives to seperate IDE channels will give a dramatic speed increase.

Instead of /dev/hda, the SATA drive will appear as /dev/sda and from there nothing is any different than your existing drive.

really? after looking at the specs the SATA 300MB/s seemed like it would make a big improvement compared to the 100MB/s EIDE drive I got now. I do some pretty heavy prossesing of geo-magnetic model data, typical 4-12 Gig file sizes so any thing I can get to boost speed would be a bonus...

tried fdsik -l /dev/sda but no luck...

Of course you have to load the module of your ATA model (enable it in the kernel)

Regards

You would probably notice a bit of a boost then
Yeah, that magic 300MB/s figure looks fantastic on paper but you'll never hit it. The SATA3G bus might be able to tranfer that much data but you'll never pull anywhere near that amount off a 7200rpm disk. The main difference is while the IDE channel rarely maintains a constant transfer speed (one min is 30MB/s, next is 50MB/s, next is 40MB/sec) and moreso when you have multiple drives on the same channel, the SATA channel can maintain the higher transfer rate consistantly.

Don't think I'm ragging on them, just don't come expecting your computer to be considerably quicker when it probably won't be. I did that and then when it wasn't I had to go look up why

yep you were right here are the timing results, with hda the eide and hde the sata...


[root@quaoar burlen]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 162 MB in 3.03 seconds = 53.44 MB/sec

[root@quaoar burlen]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hde

/dev/hde:
Timing buffered disk reads: 178 MB in 3.02 seconds = 58.99 MB/sec

That totally sucks!!!

anyway, for anyone else attempting this I was able to figure that the SATA showed up on /dev/hde by checking /var/log/dmesg

I was using IDE drives with ReiserFS before I upgraded to SATA2 drives with XFS. The speed difference when copying large files is massive. And my MoBo only supports SATA1, so the drives are only running at 150Mb/sec.

When measured with hdparm, the increase in performance was only a few Mb, but I'd do this upgrade again.

If only all my computer "upgrades" worked so well!!

It will be yes for reasons I explained above. For normal usage however I'm yet to notice a difference.