[oclug] SATA Hard Drives

[Milan Budimirovic]

Dave Edwards wrote:

>I'd like to hear any experiences, good or bad, with SATA hard drives.
>As far as I can tell, SATA support in the Linux kernel is solid, and
>there are drivers to support a fairly broad range of drives; but
>having them recognized during installs is dodgier and can demand some
>involved Linux gymnastics to get working properly.  What have you
>found?
>
>Dave.
>  
>
The install problems have nothing to do with the drives themselves but 
with the controllers. It's just that some of these controllers are new 
to the market and are not very well supported in the 2.4.x kernels.

Then again, it's sauce for the goose. Try installing Windows XPletive on 
a SATA drive. You have to hit F3 or something at the precise moment 
during initial bootup, then insert the driver disks. And XPletive will 
not install in just any partition either. You need a separate FAT 
partition for the NT boot loader, plus the bootloader has trouble 
accessing drives on some third part controllers.