[ale] My Next Computer

[Pete Hardie]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 12:44:16 -0500, Greg Freemyer
<greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Pete,
>  Warning to all, FAT32 in the 2.4 kernels from SUSE 8.1 were buggy if
> you went past 137 GB.  (I don't know if that is a device, or partition
> issue.  I tested a 250GB disk with a single 250GB partition.  Worked
> fine until I put too much data on it.)
> 
> The 2.6 kernel from SUSE 9.2 seems to work fine in my testing.

I tend to use RedHat, but I'll look for the issue anyway.


> I have one machine with a new Intel P4 MB.  It has a boot from USB
> entry in the bios.  If I have it enabled, the boot process stops if I
> have a thumb-drive in the USB port.  (i.e. The thumb-drive appears to
> be the preferred boot media.)
> 
> I have not tried putting a MBR, etc. on the thumb drive, but I assume
> it would work.

Promising news!

> 
> A bigger issue is that USB 2.0 is slow compared with ATA, and SATA
> will be even faster, so why tie yourself to such a slow technology:
> 
>     usb 2.0 = 480 mbit/sec = 50 MB/sec = slow
>     ATA/100 = 100 MB/sec = okay, and very common
>     ATA/133 = 133 MB/sec = good, but the end of the PATA line
>     SATA/150 = 150 MB/sec = Today's starting point for SATA performance.
>     SATA/600 = 600 MB/sec = the potential future of SATA drives
> 
> Admittedly, all of the above are theoretical burst speeds, but
> real-world speeds are a function of the above.

Good point, and one to consider.  I'm not sure how much effect this
will have on my home use machine - if I can cut the cost of the
upgrade to mobo+video+RAM, I moght be able to fill the board with RAM
and cut the amount of swapping enough to make it reasonable.

> What we do for all of our "movable" PATA drives is use a disk carrier.
>  The ICY-Dock carriers are about $50 each.  With them I can quickly
> move disks around and I still get the native PATA speed.  Since
> hot-swap is not supported on most ATA controllers, we do power down
> the PCs during disk moves.
> 
> SATA cables can be upto 1 meter long, but I don't know if you can get
> external SATA boxes similar to the USB-2 external boxes?

I'm clueless about SATA - does it allow hot-swapping?


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