RE: current status of alpha in squeeze - Storage Question - we will need to store the code some where - Fwd: Disk drives

["Uwe Schindler" <uwe@thetaphi.de>]

Hi,

> > As of disks, I have a one disk (Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB),
> > which I can attach for a brief period of time into my Alpha, using PCI
> > SATA controler. But I think other people is already using such disks
> > in their machines. Can anybody confirm?
> 
> I have a 1.5TB SATA disc interfaced via a PCI-X SATA controller in my
Alpha.
> Has been working fine for quite some time.  Also a lot faster than the
> onboard qlogic SCSI.  I still have a (much smaller) SCSI disc as the boot
disc
> since SRM won't boot SATA discs or Compact-Flash on an IDE interface.

Same here. I have also a large SATA disk on a 15$ PCI-SATA controller which
is still much faster than the Qlogic 1040 in my AlphaStation 500. You cannot
boot from it, as SRM on AlphaStation does neither know IDE disk nor boot
from SATA (of course). It only shows the controller (a SIL3114) as SCSI or
storage controller (!!!) but with no discs attached.

I removed the SCSI disk and the floppy drive and replaced the floppy drive
by an old SCSI-ZIP-Drive. This ZIP-100 drive is partitioned the BSD way and
the boot partition mounted as /boot with ext2 and SRM boots fine from it.
The / partition is on the SATA drive. The good thing with the ZIP drive is,
that it does not spin all the time and so is in somehow low-power sleep
state :-) I also tried a CF card using a SCSI-IDE adaptor, but I got SRM not
booting from it (it showed the CF as a SCSI harddisk, but had read error on
booting -- Linux itself was able to access the CF card when booted
otherwise).

This alpha also has an PCI USB2.0 controller :-) So all you need is running
and working. A PCI firewire controller was also working fine (not in use
anymore).

Uwe