[CentOS] SATA on Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 MB

Tue May 8 18:13:51 UTC 2007
Thanos Rizoulis <apatewna at hol.gr>

O/H fredex έγραψε:
> Hi Gang!
> 
> I've got this (now old) Gigabyte motherboard (GA-7N400 Pro2), I've had it
> for just over 3 years.
> 
> I use it, so far, with only PATA devices.
> 
> I'm toying with the idea of buying a matched pair of SATA drives and when
> I install Centos 5 (hopefully soon), building it with software raid (using
> the two drives as mirrors of each other).

I have this exact board (Rev 1.x) and it has been working solid for 
years now. However, even if this is not a straight answer to your 
question, I have to warn you about several speed problems concerning the 
on-board RAID controllers (either SATA or PATA).

How to recreate the problem:
First get the latest BIOS for this mobo, it must be the F11 and Gigabyte 
  has never released a newer version.
Second create a RAID volume through the RAID-BIOS (PATA or SATA, I 
tested heavily on PATA) and watch as your disk speed crawls to the floor 
(yes even on M$ OSes).

This is fixed in later BIOS revisions of the RAID chips, but since they 
are integrated on the board, these BIOSes are updated only when the main 
BIOS is updated (The main BIOS file contains the BIOSes for the RAID chips)
The solution is to mod your BIOS with the most recent RAID BIOS.

More info here...
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/image-vp567696.html
I have followed these instructions to the letter and have successfully 
modded my F11 BIOS to overcome the disk speed problem using the 
pseudo-hardware RAID controller.

RTFM and STFW before anything bad happens
_________________________________________
Thanos Rizoulis
Electronic Computing Systems Engineer
Larissa, Greece