Hello Chris, (Sorry about the direct reply) Tuesday, January 6, 2004, 5:59:08 PM, you wrote: CC> Greetings: CC> I am considering to build a new Linux box to replace my present one, CC> based upon an Asus A7N8X motherboard and a Western Digital Raptor 10krpm CC> serial ATA hard drive WD740GD or WD360GD. CC> I am currently running 8.1, have a box of 8.2, but haven't yet purchased CC> 9.0. From what I understand the 9.0 version still uses the 2.4.21 CC> kernel. I am not sure if this supports SATA or not. I haven't found CC> the WD drives in the SuSE hardware database. CC> Can I be confident that the SATA drives and interface on this mobo will CC> work in Suse 9.0, 8.2, or 8.1, or that there is a proven way to make it CC> work? I'm using a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP (Sil3112a controller - same as the A7N8X, correct?), with two WD2000JD 200GB SATA hdds w/o too many issues. AFAIK, the ICH5 SATA controller is not supported under the 2.4.21/22 production kernels. However, initial support is available in the 2.6 kernels from what I've read. A few issues that I've encountered while using this box and the SI bus: 1) HW Raid Support is not available (unless you use Suse 8.x, RH 8.x, or another older version of a distro that SI has posted binary drivers for). 2) Max speed I've obtained from these drives using hdparm -Tt is: Timing buffer-cache reads: 3928 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1964.98 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 168 MB in 3.03 seconds = 55.37 MB/sec 2a) Kernel 2.6.0-0 dropped the disk read perf to ~30 MB/sec. 3) I have to force-enable DMA on these drives using the /etc/sysconfig/hardware file. Using hdparm -d1X66 is a "pot shot" at best and caused me hard lockups at least 50% of the time unless I was in single user mode (init 5 raised the lockup rate to >90%). 4) MD raid support using these drives is flaky at best. An improper shutdown would require a rebuilding of each array manually, and often caused the drives to throw timeout errors upon reboot. Although, I'm now seeing "lost interrupt" errors after reverting to a non-raid setup, so I may have a hardware issue. About to test the fault tolerance of the reiserfs w/o raid on the Sil3112 bus now. That is my experience so far. IMO, SATA in Linux is not ready for prime-time, unfortunately (at least when using consumer-level hardware). -- Best regards, Brian Curtis