[lug] speaking of CD-R's that suck...

[Lee Woodworth]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
...
> SATA support really depends on the chipsets being used.  SATA is probably
> one of the things you have to be the most careful with as far as making
> sure you have a controller that's supported.  I've had good luck with the
> Intel PIIX controllers, but they're hard to find outside of a motherboard.
> I've also had good luck with the 3Ware SATA controllers, but I never run
With 2.6 kernels the via8235 & via8237 MB chipsets work for me
(MSI motherboards). Note that these don't actually use the 150MB/s
channel speeds, only upto 133MB. For the 8237, bonnie++ reports about
58MiB/s seq read and 56Mib/s seq write with an 8GB LVM volume
on a 160GB 7200RPM Samsung drive.

> them with RAID enabled on the controller.  Their RAID management tool,
> while better than most, is far inferior to the in-kernel stuff.  The down
> side is that in-kernel is harder to do mirrored boot-blocks though...
Besides disk order changing when a soft raid drive goes away, have you had
big problems with just having duplicate boot systems on the indvidual disks?
E.g. a grub stage1 in each disk's MBR and a boot parition on each disk with
multiple boot configs for the possible drive names? Just wondering since that
is how my file server is setup and I am counting on the 2nd disk's MBR & boot
partition to be usable backups.

> So, either you'll get a controller that's good and just works, or you'll
> have a world of pain.  I've had some systems that I had a heck of a time
> getting to boot, and would finally just put in a $100 3ware card and call
> it done.
According to the gentoo AMD64 notes, there are buggy MB BIOSes that cause
problems with on-board SATA controllers.