[RndTbl] Update on SATA woes

Trevor Cordes trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Mon Nov 14 11:37:10 CST 2005


> up onto it.  Anyway, for the time being I'm recommending to the Linux 
> users I support to avoid SATA drives/controllers if you can help it, 
> until things settle down a bit and the drivers catch up.

I second that motion.  SATA is a nightmare on linux right now (up to and
including FC4).  I fought with a SiI 3112 card on and off for the past 6
months trying to get it to work with no luck.  See the very relevant:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=128180

In fact, there are tons of bugzillas on problems with nearly every
imaginable SATA chipset out there.  Not a good sign.  The most common
chip, the SiI 3112, is total garbage and seems to have issues with every
modern distro except Ubuntu.

If I had to do SATA right now, I'd only attempt it with Intel's onboard
ICH and a very new distro.  Hopefully FC5 will be better in this regard.

PS: the reason the SiI works on older distros is they used the
monolithic IDE driver instead of the libata/sata_sil driver.  The
integrated driver works fine supposedly; the sata_sil driver has issues.
Ubuntu is probably using the older method, or has some patch to work
around the interrupt problem.



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