mixing IDE and SATA hard drives on a FreeBSD system

[David Kelly]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 03:22:25PM -0500, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> 
> I was thinking about putting FreeBSD and swap on the ATA100 IDE hard 
> drive and installing a SATA hard drive for home and database data.  Is 
> there any reason I shouldn't mix hard drive types?  (I've never messed 
> with SATA before.)

I have one PATA with FreeBSD installed, and two SATA striped with
gvinum. Swap spread across all 3. No particular problems. The SATA
drives are fairly recent models in 160G, the PATA is prior generation in
120G, all Hitachi. The SATA drives seem to handle seeks from multiple
processes better than the PATA, better even than might expect from
striping.

At about 4500 hours of runtime one SATA drive developed a bad block
which the drive firmware was not able to automagically substitute. gvinum
shut down.

I see no reason why a SATA drive should be less reliable than a PATA
drive. Also remember back when one could purchase the same drive
hardware in either PATA or SCSI, so find it hard to accept the interface
makes much difference in reliability.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.