On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:56:18 -0400, you wrote:

Hello, list gurus:

I've been hearing about SATA drives, lately. What are they, and can they plug into a regular drive controller, or do they need some special controller card, or what? They must have some advantage over whatever we should call normal drives, so what is it?

--doug

1) You need an SATA controller. The newer motherboards have them, or you can buy a PCI plug-in 2) Not all distros support them, or support them properly yet. I've heard rumors that SuSE 9.1 and above, with updates applied, work properly, but haven't tried. I know SuSE 9.1 with no updates didn't. 3) Advantages: Well, I've heard that it's pretty easy and fast to do a SATA raid-1, and I've seen a SATA 300 GB drive (biggest single ATA drive I've seen is 250), but you couldn't prove the former by me. I was permanantly cured of bleeding edge hardware some time back. I wouldn;t mind an answer to this one from someone who knows myself. Mike- -- If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs... You may have a great career as a network administrator ahead! -- Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded, non-attachments,

On Monday 25 October 2004 20:56, Doug McGarrett wrote:

Hello, list gurus:

I've been hearing about SATA drives, lately. What are they, and can they plug into a regular drive controller, or do they need some special controller card, or what? They must have some advantage over whatever we should call normal drives, so what is it?

SATA - A specification for consumer hard drive connections that boosts the data transfer rate up to 150MB/second. In addition, it changes IDE/ATA from a parallel interface requiring 40 separate wires to connect components to a serial interface requiring only 6 wires. 2x and 4x versions of Serial ATA double and quadruple the speed of Serial ATA. Definition provided via Google! Use it, learn it. ;) Regards, Dana

Doug McGarrett wrote:

Hello, list gurus:

I've been hearing about SATA drives, lately. What are they, and can they plug into a regular drive controller, or do they need some special controller card, or what? They must have some advantage over whatever we should call normal drives, so what is it?

SATA is an acronym for Serial ATA, which is a new drive interface, that uses a small round cable, instead of a wide ribbon cable. Both the controller and drive have to support it, though adapters are available. In addition to the smaller cable, I believe it has speed and distance advantages over the ATA connected drives and may also be hot pluggable. However, as always, Google can often provide lots of info.