[TriLUG] IDE Hard disk limitations BIOS and Linux

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Tue Dec 21 21:29:39 EST 2004


By the way. Here's a progress report.

First the bad news - 
As I said before, I haven't been able to get the PCI IDE controller
card (which is based on a Silicon Image 0680 chipset with Medley
software) to work, since it seems to get hung in the bios (either the
MOBOs or the cards) presumably because it doesn't like the raid setup.
I don't want to use it as a raid controller and I can't figure out how
to make it act like a simple IDE controller, although both the
description of the card on the intrex website and the "manual" 
(actually just a 4-page pamphlet) that came with the card say that
raid is optional.  But I notice that the first page of the manual has
what appears to be two part numbers SIL680-RAID and SIL-680-IDE so I'm
guessing that "option" here is in which version you purchase.

Now the good news -

I attached one of the new 160 GB to the second unused IDE connector
and once I got the boot order right in the BIOS, Linux came up and
sees it as a 160GB disk. Now I have to think about how I want to
partition the two big drives. I'm figuring that I'll move my /home and
/var directories rom the little SCSI drive that it's on now to one of
the big guys, and use the SCSI drives for swap and system space, which
should give me some room to play with newer system software while stil
leaving the old reliable RH9 installation until I'm comfortable with
abandoning it.  I also figure that I'll use the two big drives to
back-up the small ones and interesting stuff on each other.

Jeremy wrote a note a few months ago in which he analyzed the
efficiency of rsbackup for backing up home directories in terms of how
big the multiple backup generations were compared to how big they
would be without the hard link magic.  I'm curious as to how much
bigger a multiple generation  rsbackup of say the /home directory to
the size of the /home directory itself?



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