On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 02:40, Paulo Andre wrote: > I have to build a new firewall and the salesman is trying to sell me Serial > ATA as part of the solution. > Has anyone used this, because I have heard that Serial ATA is not up to spec? > > Paulo I have an Asus mobo with VIA chipset that includes SATA. I'm delighted with the performance. HOWEVER... Until a distro is released that has SATA drivers on the install media it is exceptionally difficult to actually install Linux to the SATA drive. I ended up needing to install to my old IDE drive, build a 2.6.0 kernel, mount the SATA drive and prep it, transfer all partitions from the old drive to the SATA, then install Grub on the SATA drive. The short of it: make DAMN sure that if you go the SATA-only route that the SATA chipset is supported by 2.4.2x kernels that are used by installers, or be prepared for a long tortuous process getting it up and running. SATA is great, IMHO, but support for it under Linux is not sufficient for worry-free installs, YET... With the final release of kernel 2.6.0 last week, I expect that to change in the near future for many distributions. (although not RedHat, of course :( and Fedora is on a scheduled release cycle, so I don't anticipate it there for a few months either) j
