Re: Hard Drive
> Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 01:54:06 -0600
> From: Troy <troy@dakota.net>
> To: William Aycock <waycock@mpinet.net>
> Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Hard Drive
> The Promise UATA card is an IDE controller card, but NOT supported
> by the Linux kernel.
Not yet, anyway. And I'd hope that with Gateway now packaging the
Promise card into new systems that it will be, at some point. I
think I recall someone mentioning that the card was supported by the
experimental kernel, or that it was available as a compile-time
option.
> To make your system work with Linux, you need to take out the
> Promise UATA card, and plug the IDE Cables from your hard drive(s)
> into the motherboard IDE port (Triton IDE Controllers, which the
> kernel supports). You may have to enable them again in the CMOS
> Setup.
Or simply wait until linux supports the hardware. No telling how
long that will take, though. It took a LONG time before any support
was added for the S3-ViRGE chipset on my old system.
> You probably will not notice a difference in performance, even when
> using Win 95/NT. the 33MB/sec is a 'theoretical' maximum for UATA
> (so they could advertise it and compete with SCSI), however, the
> bottleneck is at the hard drive. For random seeks and short reads,
> there is no (or minimal) difference between having the hard drive
> plugged into the Promise UATA card and the IDE controllers on the
> motherboard.
Though for some of us, plugging it into the board isn't an option.
My brothers computer has buggy interfaces and is outside of warranty.
Our only option _is_ to install one of those cards, at some point.
Does that mean that he should be condemned to only using Windows?
> There is no other solution. The Promise card does have some cache
> on it, and it _is_ UATA, but it doesn't matter when it is plugged
> into a 5400 RPM IDE Drive. For speed you need a Seagate Barracuda
> or Cheeta hooked up with an Adaptec 2940 Card. If you are within 30
> days of purchase, I would recommend upgrading to the SCSI option if
> you are interested in performance (especially in Linux).
It's a nice suggestion, if you can afford it. I, for one, cannot
afford to shell out almost a grand (drive and controller) to get the
amount of storage space that we need, here. Here, at least, we have
no choice but to wait for support for the card. It's a shame that
IDE takes a backseat to SCSI where development is concerned, seeing
as a lot of us that would like to get into the linux world are in
fact running off of IDE.
> Hope this helps,
> troy
Lightning
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