[plug] SATA hard drives

[Scott Middleton]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 10:47, Craig Dyke wrote:
> It would appear that most of my searches have yielded that they work
> but do not perform anywhere near their expected performance levels.
> 

Whether this is real indication of performance speeds or not is
debatable, but there is a marked difference.

bo:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/hde

/dev/hde:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.25 secons =512.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.18 seconds = 54.24 MB/sec

bo:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.25 seconds =512.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.39 seconds = 46.04 MB/sec

bo:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/md0
 
/dev/md0:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.25 seconds =512.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.42 seconds = 45.07 MB/sec

bo:~# cat /proc/ide/hda/model
WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1
bo:~# cat /proc/ide/hde/model
ST3120026AS

hde is the SATA :)
md0 is mongrel mix of 2xWD and 1 deathstar 40GB ATA100

Apparently booting SATA was a problem on some mainboards but i am not
sure if this is still the case. We haven't started using SATA on clients
servers yet. I imagine this will change in the coming months though. 
Soon (or now) PSUs will have SATA power cables as standard. It will
definitely help cooling and general neatness.

We had a lot of problems with the first mainboard we purchased. The box
said it had SATA support but further delving at the manufacturers
website at the very bottom of the page they had withdrawn that claim.
Fortunately Evox allowed us to swap mainboards without any trouble. Our
current mainboard is a Asus P4P800 it cost us around $150 and we are
quite happy with it, except for the crappy IDE VIA-Raid controller is
not supported under Linux except RedHat 7.1 (which they supply binaries
for).

Hope this helps!

-- 
Scott Middleton <scott at LinuxIT.com.au>

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