[Techtalk] Re: IDE Controller support

[Julie]

Sophie wrote:
> 
> 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?

I'll get you the number next time I have the card in my mitts.

> 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)

The controller was recognized by Win2K, but not by Linux.

> 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.

Linux had no clue that the card even existed.

Is there a controller that you or others have found works better?
Or works at all?

> > 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 :)

Heh.  This is what happens when you stop being a poor college student.
When I was in college I used 8" floppy disks.  Within a few years of
being out of college I was splurging on 35MB (that's mega-byte) drives
which seems nearly infinite compared to 1,224KB floppies.

Give yourself some time.  Before you know it you'll have more disk
space than you ever imagined.  Followed a few years later by less
than you think you need ;-)

> > 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.

I never knew such a thing even existed!  Who makes them, what are
they called, tell me more?!?
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
txjulie at austin.rr.com                  or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller