[RndTbl] SATA drives, nVidia GeForce, supported by FC1?

Gilles Detillieux grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca
Fri Mar 12 21:10:22 CST 2004


Hi, folks.  One of our colleagues wants to put together a fairly sup'ed
up PC to run our Linux based data capture and analysis software.  He is
planning on getting a Dell Optiplex GX270 Small MiniTower system (he's
very keen on getting it from Dell), with a 120 GB SATA hard drive.

Does anyone on this list have any experience with using SATA hard drives
under Linux?  I'd like him to use Fedora Core 1, as Red Hat's flavour of
Linux is what I'm used to supporting (and our software is RPM packaged
for Red Hat).  I also think he might need to stick to the 2.4 kernel,
as the driver for the A/D card we use hasn't (to my knowledge) ever been
tested on anything but 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, so I'm a bit dubious about it
working well with 2.6 for at least the next while.  What I've read so far
about SATA support on Linux, which isn't much, led me to believe not many
SATA controllers are supported yet, and that SATA support seems to be in
the 2.6 kernel.  Has anyone tried SATA drives and do they work with 2.4?

I've recommended he stick to standard ATA unless I hear of some success
stories with SATA.

A somewhat unrelated question: he was going to get this PC with an nVidia
GeForce 4MX (with DVI & VGA outputs).  I've never used this card (or any
nVidia card for that matter - we tend to stick with ATI most of the time),
so I was wondering if anyone knows if it plays well with FC1.  I did
a bit of quick googling this afternoon, but got somewhat mixed stories
with some folks complaining of nVidia's drivers breaking after a kernel
update, while some posts suggested no special drivers were needed for FC1.
I'm not quite sure they were all talking about the same card though.
Any words of wisdom?

Thanks,
Gilles

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)



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