Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Squeezing 160G on to ATA Motherboards

Posted by Cliff on from the you-can-never-have-too-many-free-bytes dept.

MadCow-ard asks: "With the introduction of the new 160 GB hard drives there comes a problem: they only appear to work with the ATA/ATAPI-6, 48 bit-standard. This means not installing them into systems that I have already built with the de facto 28 bit ATA controllers. I build video editing systems that easily reach 800 Mb, and so the Promise solution with a 2 hard drive ATA controller card doesn't really help. Is there a way squeeze these onto my systems without dropping everything above 137.4 Gb?" 160 gigs on a single HD! How soon before terabyte drives become a reality?

5 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Software matters. Which OS? Which version? by hamjudo · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not just a hardware issue. Which OS or OS's do you want to support? A solution that works for Linux may not work on some flavor of BSD. You might even be stuck with one of the dozens of lesser OSs.

  2. 3ware? by cymen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you tried 3ware? They make IDE RAID cards that have linux driver support (in the 2.4 kernel). I'm not sure if their devices support the new 48bit LBA standard. They seem to be focusing more on their larger products but their RAID cards (which are used in their larger products so they shouldn't be going away any time soon) are here.

    Promise has the FastTrak100 TX4 PCI that supposedly has four independent IDE channels (no slave/master crap, everything is master like 3ware products) so you have another option there with support for 48bit LBA in Promise drivers mentioned at linux-ide.org it sounds like a promising solution (no pun intended).

    You could always put a couple Promise Ultra100's in there too - it sucks to waste PCI slots but with high end motherboards having onboard LAN, sound, etc I would expect that you have plenty of open slots. I've used both Promise Ultra/FastTrack products (with the kernel drivers, not Promises) and 3ware products and both are great.

    From front page of linux-ide.org:
    Leading the World to Announce Native 48bit LBA Support
    Supporting Maxtor BIG DRIVE TECHNOLOGY
    Releasing Support of new Promise Ultra 133 TX2 48bit HOST
    Future Release Support of new Silicon Image's CMD 48bit HOST

  3. Re:right tool for the job by cymen · · Score: 4, Informative

    The newish IDE RAID cards can provide a high perfomance alternative to SCSI. I believe a lot of the large network storage devices use IDE drives due to the cost savings. Hopefully we'll see IDE drive makers follow IBM's lead in supporting some of the SCSI-like features like tagged queing (supported in FreeBSD - don't see support in Linux yet).

    Of course SCSI still has its place with 15,000 RPM drives but for large storage applications with RAID usage IDE is very attractive. Hopefully this will drive SCSI prices down but I'm not counting on it.

  4. Re:High-end? by cymen · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hey no problem but take a look at the motherboards that use the ServerWorks LE and HE chipset. The LE is the lower cost version that doesn't have memory interleaving (sp?). Apparently the onboard generic IDE sucks on these boards but they are great in other regards and do in fact usually feature onboard LAN and SCSI (some even have dual onboard NICs). The other chipset to look at is the 440GX and GX+.

    It is true for desktop motherboards that integrated features are bad news (although with the newer boards this is changing) but on the high end boards integrated SCSI and NICs are common. This makes it far easier to stuff a nice system into a small rack box. For example you can put a complete server into a 1U which I believe is only 1.75" high (but 19"x?? like rather large pizza box).

    Take a look at high end motherboards from Intel, SuperMicro, Tyan, and Asus. There are definately some interesting products out there...

  5. Isn't GPT meant to fix the partitioning problem? by myelin42 · · Score: 1, Informative

    Without some scheme to lie to half of your hardware you can't have more than 4 primary partitions per drive no matter what size it is (or 3 primary and only 1 extended),

    I seem to recall an article a while back talking about how the 64-bit version of Windows XP has a new partitioning system - GPT ("GUID Partition Table") - which is meant to sort out current problems with partition tables.

    And don't worry, 64-bit Linux supports it too ;-)

    MS has a document explaining their 64-bit things, including GPT and the associated support stuff -- Designing for 64-bit Windows. Things appear to be changing a fair bit -- most software will break on the new hardware they describe, but it should simplify what's left ...