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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?
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.
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
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.
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?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"