first time sata drive

hi
am planning to buy at least 8 computer to become our file server in our office
aim thinking of sata hardisk in my linuxbox"slackware9.1" my question is?
how difficult to setup a sata drive? what motherboard will i buy? i need advice
thks in advance.

I advice not to take the SATA route at this time. Most SATA common controllers are supported but stability can be an issue and it can be a bit tricky to set up at first. Furthermore, SATA doesn't provide better performance than traditional ATA/IDE at this time unless you go with very high performance disks that are only available with SATA interface, like Raptors.


Håkan

I've purchased MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR with SATA controller onboard and wd 36.7 gb 10000 rpm and they are working perfectly in linux and wins. The only drawback is that hdd is very hot and I had to buy hdd cooler and now is ok.

the trick is about installing linux on sata system that you have to load the driver for controller immediatly after boot sequence, so that operating system "sees" the hdd. In my case (promise fasttrack 376/378) the driver for linux is ft3xx.o. I've installed debian and when I inserted install cd, I've chosen from menu "preload other drivers" and then inserted the floppy which i made

What happens when it gets hot? does it cause the system to crash? I have a mystery problem that is causing my system to hang every once and a while and I can't seem to track down what is causing the problem. Could a sata drive that runs too hot cause the system to hang?

no no, it does not crash, but it is very hot, so I did not want to risk so I bought a cooler, before cooler it worked perfectly and now is workinh perfectly

Well, my question still stands. If a sata drive runs hot, would the result be periodic crashes?

no, in my example, no

My 2 cents -- any computer system can be negatively impacted by excessive heat. If any of your components are running out of tolerance in the temperature dept, then Yes, as far as I'm concerned, it will only be a matter of time before something misbehaves, or worse, seizes up or burns up.

As for TongueTied's question -- the phrase "running hot" is fairly subjective. If your system is running in the neighborhood of the top temperature rating and locks up, it could be the heat, but it very easily could be something else too. In comparison, if your system is running 30 degrees (F) over the max rating and locks up, well, no suprise. As a general answer, I would say Yes, if your system is running hot, then that would increase the chances of thermal-induced failure. -- J.W.

I have an Abit KV8 Max3 with VIA SATA in #1 and #2 spots and SiliconeImage in #3 thru #6 spots. Currently my Maxtor HD is on the VIA controller sata 1/2. I'm running an Athlon64 bit 3200+ processor with 1 GB DDR RAM. I had Linux running on it before when I had just the IDE drive, but I copied all the info from drive to drive using Copy Commander (included Partition Commander). Windows works fine. Linux does not work with the boot menu of System Commander though. so... I try to install it new but that is the kicker. Mandrake does not have a VIA driver in it's distro to recognize that I have a HD. To it I have no mass storage device to install Mandrake on. Does this mean I have to install a small IDE drive just to have Linux capabilities?

SATA DRIVES are handled via SCSI interface, you should try with SCSI drivers, just like in my case

Its safer to use two seperate drives for a server. One for the OS and the other to store files to serve the network or the internet. This way you do not have to replace a hard drive that is for both the OS and the files. You will usually will be replacing the hard drive for that is serving people.

The heat in the hard drive can ruin the data, make it not reliable, and it will fail sooner than expected. It is best to cool them down with extra heatsinks or with watercooling. If the hard drive overheats it will shutdown for a while and then resume what ever it is doing. The computer will seem that it halted but it will continue to send or to read data from the hard drive.

Try not to use on-board SATA controllers because they need a little more software than the software that are for PCI SATA controllers. I read a lot of problems with Silicon Image, INTEL, VIA SATA controllers. With 3ware, Highpoint, and Promise SATA controllers I have not read any problems with them.

Any additional controller like SCSI, SATA, and PATA will be hard to install linux on it for the first time. There are a lot of steps to follow for each manufacture. Other manufactures make it easier.

Frost, when VIA introduced SATA in their chipsets, Mandrake and other distributions will not have the module (driver). You can download the latest kernel version and compile it. Another way is find VIA newest drivers for LINUX and compile them. You then have to recreate a ramdisk image, edit your boot loader, and you have edit your fstab.