[H-GEN] SATA drives under Linux

[Joel Michael]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 14:07, Edwards_Ewan_B at cat.com wrote:
> I'm looking at buying a box with SATA controller and disc drives.
> 
> Does anyone know of any problems or gotchas running Linux 
> (probably Mandrake 10 and Fedora 2) on such hardware?

Do not mix Seagate SATA drives with SiI3112 SATA controllers (as found
on the Asus A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard, for example).  Things are pretty
good now, but a year ago it was the cause of major file system
corruption and disk i/o errors for me.  There is a bug in the SiI3112
silicon that does Really Strange Things when talking to Seagate disks,
which will actually prevent the disks from running at full speed.  A
comment in drivers/scsi/sata_sil.c in kernel 2.6.7-pre3-mm2 around line
247 states that the driver will limit the maximum number of sectors per
command to 15.

I'd also suggest using the SATA-SCSI driver if your kernel supports it
in preference to the SATA-IDE driver, the SATA-SCSI sata_sil driver
works extremely well for me with the above-mentioned Seagate disks,
while the sii3112 SATA-IDE driver required me to change the chipset
revision with the bug from 0x01 to 0x02 - I probably should send that
change in some time...

However, saying that, both Mandrake 10 and Fedora Core 2 should have
these problems sorted out by now in the distribution kernels.  I roll my
own kernels, as you may have guessed :-)

Apparently, Linux kernel developers like Intel ICH6 SATA chipsets:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0404.3/0137.html