[Tfug] SATA controller that plays well with others

[Ronald Sutherland]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Paul Steinbach <MIS at samlevitz.com> wrote:

> I am setting up a cheap, low power file/print server for a friend.  I
> will use a low end Celeron or P3 whatever I have lying around.  I will
> likely run the OS off an IDE drive and put the data on mirrored SATA
> drives.  I started with a cheap SATA card and found it completed ignored
> by Xubuntu 6.06, 7.10, DSL 4.3 and Knoppix 5.0.  Can anyone recommend an
> under $50 SATA controller card recognized by most Linux distros?  It
> would be great if I could boot from it as well.  I am fairly distro
> agnostic....
>
> --
> Paul Steinbach
>
>
I was having SATA problems on an Intel mobo until I tried Ubuntu 8.04 (it
was PATA or Windows for that one... until now).

If you have an older mobo it should have 2 PATA connectors, and you could
put 4 drives on that. For example the file server I'm using at the moment
has a system drive, two mirroring drives and 1 cdrom on the two PATA
connectors. I don't want speed just something fairly safe, I back it up with
rsync some times to a wreck of a computer, when I feel the need. Anyway I've
had fair luck with setting the master drive on PATA0 as the system drive
(/root, boot, swap...) and  the master drive on PATA1 as the cdrom. I set
both mirrors for slave mode which adds clues if I can smash the drive with a
hammer or be very kind to it when the server is disembowel. I can also build
another pile of scrap up and add those drives if some hardware fails (like
Capacitors...).
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