On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Ian C. Sison wrote: > On 4 Nov 2002, Joon Guillen wrote: > > > On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 22:13, Ian C. Sison wrote: > > > > > > On the other hand, if the motherboard ATA chipset is decent and you need > > > > only two hard drives, then buy a cheap PCI ATA adapter for your CD > > > > drive, and save the cost of hardware RAID. > > > > > > 'Decent' means several things : > > > > > > 1. that the ATA IDE chipset actually is a good, well designed, and fully > > > featured > > > > > > Just a side question: What are examples of "good" ATA IDE chipsets? > > In my experience, > > Promise and Intel give consistent UDMA 100 and to me are the most stable > at 2.4.19. > > VIA is also supported but there are some newer chipsets which reportedly > cause corruption in pre-2.4.18 kernels. > > SIS UDMA detection fails in some chipset combinations although when you > enable it with hdparm it works with no problems > > Serverworks as i said is supported but panics when it encounters bad > sectors. > > > Your mileage may vary. To be sure, get either promise or Intel. In > general if you see UDMA(xx) in 'dmesg' your chipset after the drive > detection phase, then it is supported and you are running IDE at the > fastest possible speed. >
I forgot to mention that the reason why IDE support varies from chipset to chipset is not due to the fact that the Linux IDE people are less skilled as programmers. It's because the IDE manufacturers themselves aren't up front with their specifications, and at times their chipsets are indeed broken (as Alan Cox sometimes complains about). So the rule has always been, when in doubt(r) fall back to PIO which all drives support in a stable and defined way. Unfortunately PIO is slow, and not really very useful for busy servers or desktops.... This may be a horror story to some about IDE technology, but the truth is, by default there's a much bigger chance that your server's chipset is supported, and is stable using the latest kernel (check dmesg | grep UDMA) for you to use in production, it's just the fluff concerning the few that do balk at certain combinations of chipsets and hard disks that you should know of. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
