At 19:46 22/09/2004, you wrote:
At boot time, running kernel 2.6.7-1-k7, I notice it sets all 4 of my SATA ports to UDMA/100. However, they're all supposed to be able to do SATA 150. Normally I would use hdparm to try and tweak things to make it work faster, but the 2.6 kernel recognizes SATA as SCSI drives (first SATA port is /dev/sda). So, how would I get this system to recognize the faster capabilities of my SATA ports and drive? TIA, Jacob
TBH, I don't think you'll notice any difference in speed between ATA100 and SATA150. There's no way in hell a hard drive can deliver much more than about 50MB/s, let along approach 100MB/s. I might result in slower cache transfers, but again I think you'd be hard pressed to notice it.
I'm assuming that the drives are running in DMA rather than PIO, right? Just try an hdparm benchmark (hdparm -tT /dev/sda whatever), as long as it reports decent performance then you shouldn't need to do much tweaking. A newer kernel/SATA drivers may help you in the long run, since the SATA drivers seem to improve in performance dramatically with each new release.
Disclaimer: I've only used SATA on 3ware cards so far