[CentOS] sata drives and controlers

Wed Mar 9 04:51:26 UTC 2011
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

On 03/08/11 8:20 PM, Michel Donais wrote:
> I intend to replace fading SCSI drive by a SATA one.
> The motherboard is PCI and no SATA controller on board.
> So I need a SATA/PCI  controller.
> Is there something wrong to do this kind of switch?
> Some told me that I won't be able to boot that drive.
> Loosing part of the SATA interface speed is not a decisive factor on 
> this machine
> Is there are  some prefered Linux SATA controller?
>

oldschool desktop 32bit 33Mhz parallel PCI  will be a performance 
bottleneck for more than 1 SATA drive.

Is your server PCI 32bit, PCI 64bit, or PCI-X (64bit, 100-133Mhz), or is 
it PCI-Express and if so does it have x4 or faster slots?

As someone else said, a SATA card likely will NOT be bootable, unless it 
has a boot eeprom on it, and these cost more.