mixing IDE and SATA hard drives on a FreeBSD system

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Thu May 5 03:05:34 PDT 2005


Chuck Robey wrote:

> 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.

Deskstar T7K250

        Highlights    
      Capacity - 250GB and 160GB
      Rotational Speed - 7200 RPM
 *** Interface standard - SATA II 3.0Gb/s (Serial) and ATA Ultra 133 
(Parallel)
      ATA-7 streaming feature set
      Average seek time - 8.5 ms

Same drive, different interface.  This has been the case as long as I've 
been checking out specs.  If your drives are that bad, try another 
manufacturer.  Are IDE drives more unreliable?  They cost significantly 
less, spin at lower speeds are are and are a mass-market item.  Some of 
the cost difference is interface complexity, the rest, I'm sure, is that 
SCSIs tend to manufactured to higher tolerances.  Ask owners of an IBM 
Deskstar 75 how reliable an IDE drive is :-)  (Then duck).

--Alex




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