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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