mixing IDE and SATA hard drives on a FreeBSD system

Chuck Robey chuckr at chuckr.org
Wed May 4 16:58:41 PDT 2005


David Kelly wrote:
> 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.
> 
I don't know why it's true... I can state that I've had 3 of them so 
far, and had troubles with 2, and google is chock full of reports. 
Further, the info about them being the same as their IDE brethren isn't 
true, at least, the access rate specifications are higher for SATA 
drives, in general, as compared to IDE.  Least they were the last time I 
checked, maybe it's changed inthe last 6 months.

OTOH, when I first bought mine, I was comparing in my mind with SCSI, 
not IDE, maybe they *do* compare equally with IDE, is IDE that bad? 
Certainly, SATA is less reliable thant he scsi drives.


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