Hard drive choice

[Tony Alfrey]

Net Llama! wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Tony Alfrey wrote:
>> Tim Wunder wrote:
>>> On Wednesday 07 March 2007 2:00:42 pm Tony Alfrey wrote:
>>>> OK, my fancy new MB has arrived, a Gigabyte GA-7VT600.  Oooooohh!
>>>> Now I need some drives.  My old drives were SCSI but the list has
>>>> convinced me that trying to use my old SCSI drives and controller might
>>>> be a waste of time, but I'd like to have some very reliable hard drives
>>>> and maybe be able to use device names like my SCSI drives (sda, sdb,
>>>> etc.) and be able to use several drives.  So are SATA drives what I
>>>> should use?  I like Seagate drives because they have been reliable in
>>>> the past and they have been very good about warranty replacements.
>>>> Any suggestions so I can go down to Fry's and blow off half the afternoon?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>> In January I bought 2 seagate 320 GB SATA 'ES' drives for my new system. As I
>>> understand it, their 'ES' drives are supposed to be more durable, industrial
>>> drives. I've only used them 2 months so far, so it's hard to say if they were
>>> worth the extra $5 per... bought the for 99 USD each from Newegg.
>>>
>>> HTH,
>>> Tim
>>>
>> That's great!  What SATA controller did you use?
> 
> Tim & I both have motherboards with NVIDIA's SATA controller.  His is 
> MCP55 mine is NForce4.
> 
> Looks like you got stuck with VIA.  My condolences.
> 

That's OK, the price was right.  ;-)
I can get a Silicon Image 3112 or similar flavor, which I see appears to 
be happy with 2.4.x kernels.  Maybe someone on the list will be using a 
plug-in controller.

Now I am used to SCSI drives with the big wide cable where you can plug 
in a gazillion drives in parallel as long as you have the right cable 
but it looks like these SATA controllers are one drive per port and most 
controllers have two ports.  But I have lots of PCI slots on this MB so 
can I get more controllers for more drives?  Don't laugh if it's a 
stupid question; how am I supposed to know, eh?

-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"