IDE Controller support (was: Re: [Techtalk] Software vs. Hardware RAID)

[Sophie]

On Wed, Aug/21/02 10:40:44AM -0500, Julie wrote:
> 
> Ah, good question!  I assume they are a Western Digital controller
> since that is the drive manufacturer.  The controller was included
> for free when I bought the two 120GB drives I have in the machine
> at the moment.  I'd like to add a few more 120GB drives along with
> a DVD+RW drive.

Is there a chip with a number you could read?

Unless they're for raid, I assume they use the same pci interface as ever other ide controller - I've never seen one which dosent work. Standards are a good thing :) THat said, even raid controllers work as standard ide controllers if you dont have a driver to speak to the raid part. e.g. with a highpoint raid controller I had, but with no driver, I had /dev/hd{e,f,g,h} (as linux would see it, although that happened to be a bsd system)

What kind of errors or symptoms did you get? The only problems which would be immediatley obvious to me would be with pci steering, but that shouldnt really cause trouble here.


> They don't have to support ATA/133 as I'm not using any drives
> which actually require ATA/133.  However, I do have two of those
> controllers, so if 200+GB drives become reasonable being able
> to use ATA/133 for those drives would be nice.

Wow, 200GB - the biggest drive I've ever bought is 20GB, but then i'm a poor student :)


> At the moment I do have a SCSI adapter, but I'd prefer to limit
> it to the Seagate tape drive I use for backups.  As much as I
> love SCSI, I hate the price for SCSI drives and I don't need the
> performance.  I just need lots of space ...

I mean the adapters you can get which let you plug an ide drive into a scsi bus - they're about $30. I got one when I was desparatley trying to find things to work on a non-standard single-ended bus for a pa-risc machine.

- sophie