[plug] SATA hard drives

[Craig Ringer]

> I am about to embark on building a new PC and was wondering if anyone
> had had any luck using SATA hard drives under linux?
> 
> It would appear that most of my searches have yielded that they work
> but do not perform anywhere near their expected performance levels.

You can't actually expect significantly higher performance from SATA 
than ATA-100 or ATA-133. The advantages of SATA at present lie more in 
the areas of cable management and hot-plugability. Since drives don't 
currently saturate an ATA-100 bus, going to SATA-150 won't help except 
for buffer/cache reads and writes. You'll see a small improvement, but 
that's it.

That said, if the drivers for the SATA chipsets are bad, you can easily 
see performance much lower than for common ATA-133 chipsets. It's the 
drivers that really matter.

As I don't have any machines with basic SATA onboard or any SATA cards, 
I can't really give you any answers on the hardware/driver support 
front. The 3ware SATA RAID controller works a treat, but it probably a 
tad out of your price range ;-) . SATA controllers for desktops are 
available from Promise, Silicon Image, Intel (onboard), and probably 
others - you'll want to look into their support in recent kernels.

Craig Ringer

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