mixing IDE and SATA hard drives on a FreeBSD system

jason henson jason at ec.rr.com
Thu May 5 03:07:40 PDT 2005


Chuck Robey wrote:

> 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.
>
Don't compare IDE to SCSI.  IDE is home/consumer grade.  SCSI is 
commercial/enterprise grade.  Just look at the price differences, 
because you most certainly get what you pay for with SCSI compared to IDE.

**Warning, the following contains anecdotal evidence**
I built a new rig for my brother with SATA and it has been perfect.  I 
only have IDE in my slightly older machine which runs great 24/7.  But 
this has just been my experience, as always YMMV. 

One last thing, I would avoid the first generation of most technology 
because they tend to still have some bugs.  So if you buy SATA don't et 
the discounted drive, look for a newer model and you should be good.  
Also checkout storagereview.com


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