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qnx
l33t
Joined: 25 Jun 2002
Posts: 638
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
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 Posted: Sat May 10, 2003 8:01 pm Post subject: SATA on nForce2 |
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Hi! I'm considering to make use of my ATA->SATA conventer that came with my Abit NF7-S moterboard and connect my IBM drive on SATA (through the conventor). But I have to know if:
1) SATA chip from nForce2 works on Linux at all?
2) if there are any performance boosts comparing to my current setup on ATA100
Thanks!
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Abit NF7-S rev. 2.00 (BIOS v. 2.7)
AMD AthlonXP 2500+ (Barton)
PATA Seagate ST3120022A
SATA Seagate ST3200822AS & Silicon Image 3112 chipset
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handsomepete
Guru
Joined: 21 Apr 2002
Posts: 548
Location: Kansas City, MO
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2003 8:21 pm Post subject: |
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1) What kind of chip is it?
2) From what I've heard, SATA performance ain't so great yet, especially through the converters. I couldn't tell your for sure since my Promise controller may or may not ever have drivers (something about the devs not working on the driver because Promise are being tight-lipped about specs or being jerks or something...). Ask Google. |
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SpaceAgeSage
n00b
Joined: 03 Feb 2003
Posts: 4
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2003 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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The lowly n00b comes to save the day! This is my first post forgive my icky grammar 
The Chipset on the Abit nf7-s board is a Silicon Image 3112 it's supported by the SiI driver, you can find it in most if not all of the 2.4.21[2.4.21_pre7 in my case] kernels in the same place the rest of the ide controllers are found, mileage may very since this driver seems to be under heavy development.
I'm running my Abit nf7-s board (same revision as yours 2.0 with 1.1 bios) with a Western Digital 800JB hard drive on the PATA-SATA converter that came with the board.
I needed to tweak with hdparm to get DMA working, since it boots in pio mode.
To enable DMA I played around with hdparm quite a bit, locking the system a few times (sometimes it would seem to work and then freeze a minute or two later) until I came up with :
| Code: | | # hdparm -d1 -c1 -X69 |
and that gets me
| Code: | # hdparm -Tt /dev/hde
/dev/hde:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.24 seconds =533.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.42 seconds = 45.07 MB/sec |
Not too shabby playing music in the background while I ran that
This seems to work for me using the gs-sources kernel, the ac-sources might work, I'm sure there are others.
I haven't done a whole lot of testing using this hdparm setting, played some ut2003 for an hour or so, playing music, copied a few files around, ran hdparm -Tt /dev/hde quite a few times, haven't had any trouble so far.
I never got DMA working with the 2.5.69 sources (development-sources and mm-sources) but I'm sure I didn't try every hdparm option on the 2.5 kernels. All the DMA options with hdparm I did try would lock the system/spew out tons of fun ide errors.
Other things to note, would be that SATA 1 is /dev/hde and SATA 2 is /dev/hdg I've added hdg=none into the kernel line in my grub.conf since without it the kernel takes it's time not finding the drive, then reseting the drive that's not there, and gives a nasty error. I think you can get the kernel to 'boot off board controller first to make /dev/hde = /dev/hda but I haven't played with that yet, don't think I will even, seems to work well enough at the moment.
Any questions? I'll help if I can
|*minor update*| I am using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" in my make.conf just in case that effects the version of the gs-sources, bleeding edge never felt so good
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qnx
l33t
Joined: 25 Jun 2002
Posts: 638
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
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| Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 6:11 am Post subject: |
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Thanks a lot, for now! Plenty of usual information here, gotta try it when I have some time...Now I have a lot of exams and so on, but soon, soon I hope.....
Thanks again!
*printing this thread *
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Registred Linux user #191143!
Abit NF7-S rev. 2.00 (BIOS v. 2.7)
AMD AthlonXP 2500+ (Barton)
PATA Seagate ST3120022A
SATA Seagate ST3200822AS & Silicon Image 3112 chipset
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mrfree
Veteran
Joined: 15 Mar 2003
Posts: 1303
Location: Europe.Italy.Sulmona
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2003 7:18 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Other things to note, would be that SATA 1 is /dev/hde and SATA 2 is /dev/hdg I've added hdg=none into the kernel line in my grub.conf since without it the kernel takes it's time not finding the drive, then reseting the drive that's not there, and gives a nasty error. I think you can get the kernel to 'boot off board controller first to make /dev/hde = /dev/hda but I haven't played with that yet, don't think I will even, seems to work well enough at the moment. |
You probably have some devices on the nforce2 ide channel and compile it build-in in the kernel, during the boot NFORCE2 ide driver take precedence (hda,hdb,hdc,hdd) on the SIIMAGE driver (hde,hdg - NOTE: hdf,hdh are actually unusable because on sata channel u can use only a device).
If you boot from a sata device, you can try to build nforce2 driver like module and then add it to etc/modules.autoload; with this mod your sata hdds will probably take hda and hdc
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SpaceAgeSage
n00b
Joined: 03 Feb 2003
Posts: 4
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2003 1:11 am Post subject: As an update |
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I've updated my kernel to a slightly newer version of the gs-sources and the sata is now on /dev/hda without me changing anything significant in the kernel config, I guess it uses a newer version of the sata driver. I'm about to try the mm-sources it's been a week or two since I played with the mm-sources and it's gone up 5 release numbers
Wouldn't compiling it as a module break booting off a drive on the sata since the kernel needs to be able to read the drive to get the module?
As to the sata only supporting two devices I'd heard a roomer that in the future this chipset might support 4 drives, but don't quote me on that since I read it in some scuzy hardware forum heh.
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