Squeezing 160G on to ATA Motherboards

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?

Comments

Software matters. Which OS? Which version?

[hamjudo]

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.

right tool for the job

[mattdm]

Sounds like for the systems you're building, SCSI would be a better choice. Not only will you avoid the sort of problems you're describing, but performance will be far better, especially since you're connecting multiple drives.

Re:right tool for the job

[cymen]

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.

3ware?

[cymen]

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

3ware: supported by everything...

[Wakko Warner]

I just bought the 6800 for my FreeBSD box; I'm gonna shove about a half-dozen 100 gig drives in it so I can archive all my live concert recordings in SHN format. The cool thing about these cards is each drive gets its own dedicated controller and they're *real* RAID, none of this fake-ass Promise half-software stuff. I won't have to bother with vinum either.

The question I have for the original poster is: why bother with 160 gig drives when 100s are cheaper, and a bunch of them (or even a few striped pairs) will be a lot faster than a few, much-more-expensive 160 gig drives?

Is it time to put IDE on the ash heap of history?

[unitron]

Isn't IDE being kept alive by a bunch of tricks designed to get around built-in limitations that were the result of IDE being come up with back when all sorts of digital space was at a much greater premium? 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), and only 4 IDE devices per machine. (I know you can install an extra controller card for a couple more IDE channels, but who has that many IRQs to spare?)

SCSI offers more devices but can it do more primary partitions per drive?

Maybe it's time to replace the whole ISA-PCI-IDE started out as an 8-bit platform and got patched and kludged time and time again mess with something that anticipates that what now seem like big drives, big RAM sticks, and fast processors and video cards will soon be classed with 8088s and 64K ram chips. And maybe there's something better than x86, or could be.

And while I'm ranting, how about we *don't* go through another episode of incompatible form factors for motherboards, cases, and power supplies (not to mention memory) that make brand name boxes un-upgradeable except by pitching them into the landfill and buying a whole new system.