Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux Software

Linux Now Supports Ultra ATA/100 180

Posted by timothy from the ahead-of-the-power-curve dept.
salty dog writes: "Linux now supports Ultra ATA/100 HDDs, initially funded by SuSE Linux. Get the driver from: [www.linux-ide.org]." As you either know or have probably guessed, ATA/100 is the successor to the ATA/66 hard drive interface standard. And as the linux-ide.org site puts it, "Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to Future Technology Standard!" 'Nuff said.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux Now Supports Ultra ATA/100 More

Linux Now Supports Ultra ATA/100

Comments Filter:

  • Okay, fine, but... (Score:3)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:02PM (#1020558)
    Am I the only one who can't get Linux to boot from an ATA/66 drive? LILO just hangs.

    Someone ought to fix that first :)

  • HEY! My Hyundai is plenty fast!

  • NT4, up to and including service pack 6a, doesn't enable DMA support by default, let alone UDMA66. M$ don't document this (although they did eventually provide an app to enable it). I would bet 99.9% of NT installations are still using PIO mode and wondering why their hard disks are so slow...
  • My real question is "IS THERE A NEED FOR THIS?"

    The answer is "yes". To convince yourself of this, just try moving a CD image from one disk to another, or unpacking an archive of Mozilla. Not to mention the direct correlation with paging performance.
    --
  • As exciting as this is, has anyone read any of the fine print regarding the drives? From my memory of the Maxtor drive I just bought:

    "Capable of 66Mb/s transfers for a max duration of 3ms, as per the ATA/66 standard."

    Wow, 66megabit/sec for a whole 3ms. It's no wonder why there is zero noticeable difference between ATA/33 and ATA/66 drives.

    --Jeff

  • They don't want unencrypted digital audio anywhere on your PC. They want the speakers to decrypt the audio with the RIAA private key.

    Pan
  • I have USB speakers, and a USB scanner. When I get my next latop, I will be able to carry my nice light scanner with me to the library.

    Neither works in Linux. Both (now) work in Windows 2000. The speakers had BETTER work, of course, as they're Microsoft brand.
  • You can run any process under any user ID, for starters. That's multi-user in my books.

    Terminal Server also allows more than one user to have a GUI session simultaneously.

    Telnet Services, available for years now, allow multiple users to have text sessions simultaneously.

    So shut up and do your homework!
  • "Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to Future Technology Standard!" 'Nuff said.

    That's what the story sad. That's what the parent said. Linux didn't beat anyone. At least not in this case. But who cares anyway? All that matters is that they are on top of things enough to support it right away so noone says Linux is backwards and behind the times.

    Marc

  • ATA100? (Score:4)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @07:44PM (#1020567)
    Amazing, yet more wasted bandwidth on desktop systems. So tell me again why we are getting faster IDE speeds rather than moving to something like SCSI or IEEE 1394 (Firewire)? IDE blows if you're concerned with speed, 66 and 100mhz are fine if you're running several devices simultaneously but IDE doesn't do that does it? No. We'd be fine with PIO 4 since even 7200rpm hard drives can barely max out that bandwidth. Keeping IDE alive longer is pissing me off, why can't we move onto some more efficient standards? The Serial STS is an option, as is Firewire. Internal FW drives would be awesome, no more jumpers or SCSI IDs and alot less wiring inside my box. It'd be a nice thing to have removeable drives that could be both internal and external, say if I want to take my Orb drive or CD-R over to my friend's box to do some data transfering. Linux needs plenty of work in the Firewire area (which by the way has supported devices out RIGHT NOW). Imagine if VA or LinuxCOmputers could ship FW enabled systems, they would make as much headway as Apple has with them. I bet many companies would even write up Linux drivers for their equipment since it is a viable platform that more people are migrating to.
  • No, not quite. I recieved training on the Promise Ultra 100 cards about two weeks, with hands on experience in checking the drivers for Windows. Being a Linux fan is fine, but having the facts straight is also a good thing.

  • A Traditional Holy War: ATA vs SCSI (Score:5)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @07:52PM (#1020569) Homepage Journal

    How does ATA/100 compare with SCSI in speed? Reliability? Price?

    Reliability

    These days, the HDA (Hard Disk Assembly) is usually the same for both SCSI and ATA (IDE) disk drives. They simply use a different PCB (Printed Circuit Board) for different bus interfaces. Thus, all other things being equal, reliability should be about the same.

    Of course, all other things are not equal. Generally speaking, very-low-end systems will never see SCSI, and very-high-end systems will never touch ATA. Thus, some really cheap (i.e., unreliable) drives are only available in ATA versions, and some really expensive (i.e., more reliable) drives are only available in SCSI versions.

    Price

    Despite the fact that there is no practical difference in cost of materials, SCSI drives are almost always much more expensive then their ATA counter-parts. There are two reasons for this.

    The first is volume. A lot more ATA drives get sold then SCSI. But the second reason is the more significant one: SCSI is still considered a "high end" technology. Such technologies command a premium price. Thus, manufactures charge more for SCSI drives, and people are willing to pay it.

    Performance and Features

    ATA does not support device disconnection. This means only one device at a time can be using the bus. Since your average hard drive is going to sustain maybe 15 MByte/sec throughput, if you're lucky, even ATA/33 is overkill. ATA/66 and ATA/100 are completely useless to everyone but marketing types.

    SCSI is the clear winner here:
    • 160 MByte/sec maximum transfer rate
    • Up to 16 devices per bus
    • External devices
    • Cable lengths measured in feet, not inches
    • More kinds of devices (scanners, etc.)
    • Device disconnection
    • Multiple buses per controller IRQ
    • Multiple initiators (controllers) per bus
    • Tagged command queueing

    I've heard people claim that "most users don't need" the features and performance of SCSI. I disagree at two levels: One, I think they do. Even if it is just wondering why all their applications slow down when the CD-ROM drive is busy, regular users encounter the problems of ATA. And second, if regular users don't need that kind of performance, why are they bothering to upgrade ATA at all?

  • Reality check: Cached data can be transfered quicker. Many HDD have around 2Mb of cache.

    uhhm yeah. That's gonna do much good. It's only beneficial for occasional reads of small files, nothing else. Especially not sustained reads/writes.

    There can be two HDD on this bus, don't just think about one HDD.

    uhhm, so what??? only *one* drive can work at a time (the other one waits). IDE is *NOT* concurrent, contrary to what your post would seem to imply.

    Transfer rates are going up all the time as HDD technology improves. Best to get a faster rate now than be bottle-necked in a few months.

    uh-huh. sure. We still haven't crossed 33Mb/s "bottleneck", *3 years* after the introduction of UDMA33.

    ATA/100 is serial you can have longer thin cables. The ATA/33-66 used those horrible short ribbon cables, its worth having this standard just for this reason.

    I don't think so. If you really want longer ribbon length, you might as well go SCSI. It will also give you concurrency and up to 15 devices per SCSI host adapter. They are beating a dead horse with this ATA stuff. Then again, it's a pretty good marketing gimmick. For an average Joe ATA/66 = twice as fast as ATA/33.
    ___

  • Agreed, this article is a joke. (Score:4)

    by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:05PM (#1020571) Homepage
    Lets see... Oh yes, Linux now has ATA/100 support and Windows doesn't, woohoo! Lets all celebrate because we're faster then MS!

    Wait a second... how long do you think for a Windows ATA/100 driver to be available really? I mean as soon as there is anything even remotely resembling demand for it, it will come into existance.

    And just for the record, Windows has had USB support for well over two years now, whereas I try to plug a USB device into Linux, and...

    Nothing!

    So I guess MS has Linux beat by two years. Woohoo! Go MS!

    Give me a break.

    (ps - there is that whole ATA/100 being really pretty useless considering hard drive speed and the overall fact that IDE sucks compaired to SCSI anyway, but thats not really important to the whole "ra ra we support it first!" nonsense)
  • Well, if we're going to talk about windows drivers and the way they are installed, have you ever had registry problems? I can't tell you the number of times my registry has been screwed up by installing new drivers in windows, forcing me to reinstall because fixing the registry is like answering what is the meaning of life (ie impossible). Atleast in linux, I know where drivers are being installed and what files are being changed.
  • In my experience, ATA/66 drives are rarely much faster than ATA/33, and benchmarks I've done and seen reflect that.
    ATA/66 seems to only be able to achieve the 66Mb/sec about 10% of the time, the rest of the time it runs closer to 33!

    It makes you wonder exactly how much trust to put in the "100" in ATA/100 given its track record. Much like CDROM drives in the past, hard drives seem to tout a maximum speed which is achieved very rarely.

    However, I hope I'm wrong. Most aspects of computers have been getting faster and faster over recent years, except harddrives.
    Given the huge size of some of the newest OSes (*coughwin2kcough*) we are going to need all the speed we can get, otherwise it's going to be back to the old C64-loading-off-tape days where you had to anticipate wanting to use your computer so you could boot it up while you did something else! ;)


    "How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge [insurge.com.au] - AK47
  • Now what do we do?

    (kicks stone nervously)
  • I'm sure you aren't the only one, but linux _will_ boot off ATA66. I set up a system with a BP-6 mobo and the only thing not on the ATA66 controller is the cdrom.
  • Actually, if you were to take a look into kernel 2.3.xx or 2.4-test1, you will see that Linux is now beginning to support both USB and the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) devices. When I first installed Linux, I instantly realized it was superior to Windows. The first time I booted Linux, it had detected my sound card, and initialized it correctly. Meanwhile, when I had previously tried the same hting with windows, it had all kinds of problems with my sound card, even after I downloaded the drivers for it. Now I never run Windows at all, and sometime when I have nothing else to do, I may just delete it.
  • "Stick two drives on there and watch your 40MB/s burst your ATA/66 cables"

    Correct me if I'm wrong.

    ATA/66 allows for 66 megs per sec per channel. usually 2 channels per interface. 2 devices can fit on a channel (master and slave). However, and this is important, only 1 device per channel can be accessed at once at any given time (either master or slave). so in fact you won't ever saturate an ATA/66 interface with drives that can only burst at around 40 megs per sec.

    Hope this clears it up.
  • stupid question but what technologies has linux beaten M$ with? KDE, Gnome...oh yea that all important ATA 100 standard...can it even be called a standard yet??? yea yea yea, but with out M$ creating their little monopoly and making PCs essentially easy to use and idiot boxes, then none of you would have a friggin computer. I actually have no preference in OS, I have used almost all of them, still a few thousand more linux distros to go through, but hey i got time. moderate my ass down again to troll, but that's what's to be expected from a bunch of elitists that don't even give credit where credit is due. i hate m$, i hate redhat, i hate suse, i hate em all...why because they all have their own intricate problems, either it be bsod, core dumps or whatever...
  • > As I recall it took quite some time for the linux kernel to do udma32, while Windows supported it very quickly.

    When you compare, say, operating budgets, you should marvel that Linux ever beats Microsoft to anything.

    But then Microsoft has other notions about what innovative means. Their priorities lie elsewhere.

    --
  • The fix that works for my BP-6 motherboard is
    to add the option "linear" to /etc/lilo.conf.
    Did you try that?

  • Hmmm. I don't know how hush hush that whole USB issue is. I seem to be able to do a search on Windows USB support and come across a whole slew of articles including this one that specifically outlines which version have/not have support.

    http://support.micro soft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/7/56.ASP [microsoft.com]

    They've even got some articles on building your own USB drivers and add functionality to them.

    Now explain to me exactly how that is hush hush?

  • That's a senryu, not a haiku, you loser ;-)
  • In theory, this is possible, and you could get much better performance out of your disks. You could also make it transparent; the user would never need to see that the disk was RAIDed.

    If you use RAID-0 (striping), you don't even loose space (although modern drives already contain their own error correction codes, so this is kinda meaningless).

    The problem is that in order to pull this off, the heads have to be able to read or write every disk platter simultaneously. I believe it is possible to get disks that do this, but I they're very expensive. Essentially, the mechanical problem of aligning the head is very tricky, and doing it in n places requires n times as much infrastructure.

  • That's how all caches work, you know. The OS is smart enough to read ahead and write behind (well, at least the OS I'm using ;-)

    ___
  • Win2k does indeed support USB. And win2k is essentially a marketing name for NT 5.0, so Windows NT has supported USB for about 6 months now.
  • No, had it not been for M$, we'd all be using Macs (or at least the hardware... people would have still created open source Unix variants)
  • Similar to the adoption of ATA/66, ATA/100 support will first come to market with add-in PCI cards before being integrated into motherboard chipsets.

    Actually, there is already one motherboard I know of that supports ATA-100. It is an Abit Athlon board. There will be several others soon that support it. I believe most of the Socket A boards coming out over the next month or so will support it.

    I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but supporting this before Windows is somewhat trivial. Approximately 100% of the hardware that supports it will come with Windows drivers in the box. But it is nice to see Linux on even ground.

  • This is wonderful for OSS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux is a great OS. How will other GPLed desktop OSes like AtheOS [atheos.cx] keep up with these developments. Are there projects to port these drivers to other GPLed OSes?
  • Now explain to me exactly how that is hush hush?
    Thanks for the link, allow me to save the other readers having to click it, I'll extract the relevant parts right here.

    1.Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click System.

    2.Click the General tab.

    3.Locate the version number under the System heading, and then see the following table.

    Release Version File dates USB support Is USB support downloadable?*
    Windows 95 retail 4.00.950 7/11/95 no no
    Windows 95 retail SP1 4.00.950A 7/11/95 no no
    OEM Service Release 1 4.00.950A 7/11/95 no no
    OEM Service Release 2 4.00.1111 (4.00.950B) 8/24/96 no no
    OEM Service Release 2.1 4.03.1212-1214 (4.00.950B) 8/24/96-8/27/97 yes n/a
    OEM Service Release 2.5 4.03.1214 (4.00.950C) 8/24/96-11/18/97 yes n/a
    *If you have a version of Windows 95 that does not have USB support, and you want USB support, Microsoft recommends that you upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition.

    NONE of those have the downloadable USBSUPP.EXE patch that turns OSR2 into OSR2.1, yet I have that patch archived on a CDR. The file exists. Microsoft is saying that to get USB support, you need Windows 98 Second Edition, which is bullshit, and is bad for the customer because Win98SE is much much slower than OSR2(and costs more money).

    Additional OEM Information In Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2), 2.1 (OSR2.1) and 2.5 (OSR2.5), not all files have the version stamp that is listed in the table. In OSR2.1 and OSR2.5, only files that were updated to provide support for the Win32 Driver Model (WDM) and USB may have this version stamp (the other files have the same version stamps as the corresponding OSR2 files).

    You can view file version information by right-clicking a file in Windows Explorer, clicking Properties on the menu that appears, and then clicking the Version tab. If there is no Version tab, there is no version information available for that file.

    Updates to Windows 95 OEM OSR2 generally have a version of 4.00.1112 or later.

    To determine whether you are running OSR2.1, check for "USB Supplement to OSR2" in the list of installed programs in the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel, and check for version 4.03.1212 of the Ntkern.vxd file in the Windows\System\Vmm32 folder.

    If you are running OSR2.5 and you uninstall the USB Supplement by using the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel, the version number changes to 4.00.950b on the General tab in System properties.

    NOTE: All versions of Microsoft Windows 98 include USB support.

    Gee its really nice to tell me how to find out what version of windows I have, and if it has USB support, but nowhere does it say where to download USBSUPP.EXE to upgrade OSR2 to OSR2.1, which adds support for USB.

    Last Reviewed: March 31, 2000
    © 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use.

  • I like redhat, but I too noticed that sometimes they add "features" the way that they think things should be done.

    A few more issues:
    1-Broken version of the ISC dhcp server is the one included with the distro for the longest time.

    2- use of pump instead of dhclient

    3- PCMCIA support not in standard locations

    I really wish that they would include a step-by-step list of changes to the kernel that they make with patches / links to patches that they use so that an avereage user can "redo" a kernel on their own..

    --
    Amarillo Linux Users Group [alug.org]

  • Bzzt, try again (Score:4)

    by Zagato-sama ( 79044 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @08:36PM (#1020591) Homepage
    I'm amazed at how Linux has managed to "beat" Microsoft once again. Windows drivers for ATA/100 are already available. Several hardware sites have demonstrated these drives running and benchmarking accordingly.

    In fact, what amazing new hardware technologies has Linux supported before Microsoft? It's more like the other way around. Microsoft is first to recieve support for new video cards, scsi cards, network cards, etc...etc...

    Please don't spout more Anti-MS garbage, we get enough of this propoganda as it is. Correct the subject of this newsbit if you have journalistic integrity.

  • YES! (Score:1)

    by Svartalf ( 2997 )
    For the home user desktop, it might not be needed, but for someone trying to do low-end server stuff or doing development work, every drop of speed counts. I switched from an ATA-66 drive to two Ultra2 SCSI drives because the ATA-66 drive just wasn't powerful enough when I pushed it doing development work on it.
  • My card is an NVidia TNT2, but I'm assured by NVidia that the AGP problem is a M$ one; they have a pre-release (and non-releasable) patch from M$ which solves all their problems.
  • It is widely known that the ATA/66 standard is a theoretical improvement over ATA/33, but presents few real-world benefits. I read somewhere (Thought it was storagereview, but I can't find the article on their site now) that it's surprisingly well-implemented. I can't even remember the drive being tested, but I remember seeing the graphs of performance, which varied from 50+MB/s on the outside to ~35 on the inside of the drive. Crap! Can't find it. Anyway, it was a considerable improvement.

    I still think SCSI is superior though. Even UW2 v. ATA/100. UW2 has a max. transfer rate of 80MB/s, while ATA/100 has a max. transfer of (surprise, surprise) 100MB/s. Regardless, UW2 SCSI supports 7 devices per interrupt, whereas IDE supports only 2. For systems with several drives, this is a considerable improvement, and definately worth the extra few hundred dollars for the controller and for each HD. Further, while IDE devices are seeking, the channel cannot be used. So, if a CD is seeking (85-110ms), the other device on its channel cannot be used. In contrast, while SCSI devices are seeking, the SCSI bus can be used for other things. When multiple SCSI drives are on the same chain, data can be requested from one, and while it is searching, more data can be requested from the other, reducing total latency.
  • First, are you using a supported card or chipset? I had a problem for a while with a Promise66 card for a while and booting off of my drives. Turns out the bios wasn't giving correct cylinders/heads/sectors numbers so after passing the correct values to lilo everything worked.

    Take a look at the output from lilo and read the lilo documentation for more information on what it means. For example getting to LI- is different from getting to LI is different from getting to LIL-, etc.

    Good luck.

  • Re:SCSI? (Score:3)

    by QBasic_Dude ( 196998 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:18PM (#1020597) Homepage
    The performance overhead of SCSI over IDE comes from structure of the bus, not the drive. The nature of the SCSI bus allows it much better performance when doing data hungry tasks such as multi-tasking. The SCSI bus controller is capable of controlling the drives without any work by the processor. Also, all drives on a SCSI chain are cable of operating at the same time. With IDE, one is limited to two drives in a chain, and these drives cannot work at the same time. In essence, they must "take turns".

    For most people, IDE is just fine and offers very good performance. The reason I believe one does not need to get SCSI, though, is that most users do not use their system in a way that would actually justify the SCSI bus. While the nature of the bus is faster, it takes certain situations to actually need it. Couple this with the significantly higher price, one can see that they can easily live with IDE.

    IDE vs. SCSI [pcmech.com]



  • Have you tried GRUB? (Score:3)

    by tilly ( 7530 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:18PM (#1020598)
    Just curious.

    I know a number of people with odd booting situations and they often find that GRUB can handle situations LILO has trouble with.

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • Re:Speed is good, but is there demand? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What are you smoking? Have you ever used a system with scsi or ATA/66? ATA/66 is very noticebly faster then ATA/33. And scsi blows the doors off both of them.
    So if all you do is check email then keep your ATA/33. It looks like most of the name-brand motherbaord manufacturers support ATA/66 and since hard-drvies are mostly ATA/66 and always dropping in price. Whats the arguement? anti-progress? I don't see how fast progess affects standards if there backwards compatible like ATA/66 is.
    Anyway I am going Adaptec 29160N and Quantumn Atlas 18.4Gb 160 scsi. screw ide.

  • 2000-06-06 13:21:54 Linux supports Ultra ATA/100 (articles,linux) (rejected)

  • To be honest, there is no need on the desktop as far as I can tell. How many hard drives can sustain 33MB/s, let alone 66 or 100? None that I know of. Sure, burst speeds go up, but when is that needed?

  • ATA/100 products (Score:3)

    by Lazy Jones ( 8403 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:22PM (#1020602) Homepage Journal
    Harddisks: IBM has the Deskstar 75GXP series, Seagate the Barrac uda-ATA II [seagate.com], and Quantum apparently owns the patent, so they must be about to release something. Maxtor claim to be shipping ATA/100 drives [maxtor.com] already (either new versions of the not-so-new DiamondMax Plus 40, for example, or perhaps they had to hold back that announcement until Quantum allowed it).

    As for mainboards, the Abit KA7-100 is out [abit.com.tw] and new chipsets will support ATA/100 as well (like the SiS730s [abit.com.tw]).

  • About as fast, in all honesty (Well, Ultra/160, as the name says does 160 MB/s). However, IDE drives will almost certainly continue to lag SCSI in seek time, rotational velocity, cache, and efficency. As it stands, I hear a lot of people claim that you can put 6-10 top-of-the-line SCSI disks on a Ultra/160 chain before IO contention becomes a serious problem. Since ATA is limited to 2 (though they don't share the bus as well as SCSI), I don't think 100 MB/s is going to be a bottleneck anytime soon.

    I suspect that due to complexity, SCSI controllers are more likely to fail but offer more options for redundancy and hot swap. SCSI drives are (in my experience) more reliable than ATA.

    Obviously SCSI components are 50-1000% more expensive.
  • One other point that I should have mentioned (this is (as usual) better suited to SCSI than IDE, but...) The cache lets you aggregate all of the data during a disconnect. You can store the requested data and not worry about sync xfers. IDE doesn't do disconnect, but chances are, you'll collect before you ack, so you can burst out the xfer at the best available speed.
  • Everyone keeps bitching about how ATA/66 and ATA/100 are useless upgrades. First of all, they're backwards compatible, so I don't really see any issues there. Of course no one can buy an ATA drive that will do 100MB/s. However, it's quite easy to do IDE RAID (remember the Promise Fastrak66 conversion? They're coming out with a Fastrak100 soon -- this month, I think) and net more than 33MB/s, and within the next year, more than 66MB/s. Yeah, SCSI is a nicer technology once it's working. But how many of you have really gotten your hands bloody trying to properly terminate, sequence, hookup, and assign IDs for SCSI chain after SCSI chain? I know I have. So SCSI kicks ATA's ass for server applications and what not. ATA just *works*. SCSI's just not worth the cost unless you're 1) An irrational SCSI zealot (which I once was) or 2) Running a server, or broadcast quality video editing, or something else equally demanding.
    I've found being a zealot is a good way to pay more than you need to.

    -RevRigel

  • Re:SCSI? (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )

    The fastest SCSI drives are at 10,000+ rpm at the moment. IDE has only recently reached 7200 rpm.

  • that Linux ever beats Microsoft to anything.

    Try IPv6 on for size.
  • <i>"Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to future technology Standard!" </i>

    Sorry, guys. I'm a Linux guy, but that's not appropriate--at least when it comes to hard drive standards.

    Redhat 6.0(or Mandrake 6) won't even <i>boot</i> off of a Maxtor 40GB UDMA/66 drive. Doesn't even degrade gracefully: It Don't Boot.

    Don't know about 6.1. I just used a boot floppy to get me to the point where I could upgrade to a more flexible kernel revision.

    Sorry to burst anyone's bubble :-)

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • Multiuser does not mean that it has effective preemptive multitasking.
  • It's feasable for non-control devices, at least. My USB modem was slightly cheaper than it's equivilent serial model.

    As for the usb mice, they have a higher sampling rate, which means higher accuracy. They have attained fair popularity with the gaming crowd, at least.
  • So Microsoft moving the DAC outside the pc and into the speaker itself is better? I'm not sure I follow. The signal is still being converted.
    Of course there are other things that are being put inside the pc that belong outside, such as DSL routers, not to mention the obliteration of hardware thats being emulated in windows-only software, at the same cost to the consumer (winmodems cost the same as real modems here).

    I also know someone whose parallel port scanner still isnt supported in Windows 2000.
  • >>First, get it right: RS-232 is the +/- 12v
    >>serial interface that you mentioned. The current
    >>loop standard of which you speak was 20mA, not
    >>4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA
    >>variant.)

    How about if you get it right.

    RS-232 is not +/- 12vdc but is actually +/- 3-25vdc. It is also no longer RS-232 (or even RS-232C,) but eia-232 since the _R_eccomended _S_tandard has actually been ratified by the EIA/TIA.

    Second there is a 4-20ma current loop standard (analog) in addition to the 20ma current loop (digital)

    So go pick your nit somewhere else if you're not going to do it right.

  • First, get it right: RS-232 [demon.nl] is the +/- 12v serial interface that you mentioned. The current loop [demon.nl] standard of which you speak was 20mA, not 4mA. (In fact, the military used to use a 60mA variant.)

    Speaking of good standards that persist for a reason, consider VT-100. How long has it been since DEC introduced the first VT-100s? And how many of you are using xterm, dtterm, Eterm, gnome-terminal or one of a half-dozen other programs that implement some flavor or forward-compatible superset of VT-100?

    --Joe
    --
  • Seeing as the number of Linux users is constantly expanding, I think this may just be a new beginning. Now there are probably enough user out there so as soon as a protocol is published, people will begin to band together and write a driver for it. Before, and still now, there are those who are trying to see what else Linux can support/run on (they've ported it to robots & graphing calculators). The change is that before, people though "well, I have a {insert device here}, and I think I'll see if I can port Linux to it", but when they saw a new protocol (USB) a lot of them thought "Oh. Well, I'll never have one of those" so they wouldn't bother porting to it/ adding support for it. Now there are always people who have either already ported Linux to everything in their house/office, etc., or who realize that the newly released protocol is just what they need, and so, they go and crank out a driver for it.
  • "When I first installed Linux, I instantly realized it was superior to Windows"

    Simply because it initialized your sound card, it is superior? Too bad the whole computer industry doesn't have such low standards.
  • it's when/if the motherboard manufactures get on the ball and start making ATA/100 interfaces.

    The Abit KA7-100 KX133 board, interestingly enough an Athlon mobo, comes with ATA-100 built in, and is available right now at GamePC.com among other places: GamePC's mobo page [gamepc.com]

    -------------
    The following sentence is true.

  • No, that wasn't the only reason. For one, It was that it actually did what it was supposed to do. And this was on a 2.0.3x kernel too. now I run 2.2.15 & 2.4.0-test1, and both of them have shown great advances in support. Then again, you should have seen windows running on the same machine. It was (and still is) slower, buggy, and an all around piece of crap. As for those 'low standards', an Open Source OS has higher standards than the rest of them. When a windows user finds a bug, or is just dissatisfied with the OS, they just think "Oh. Well, that's windows", and they never bother to do anything about it. If someone finds something that they don't like or doesn't work for them under Linux, FreeBSD, or any other Open-SOurce OS, they actually DO something about it.. Besides, the only solution that windows has for the Pentium f0 0f bug is to search the HD for anything that will trigger it. Linux actually has a workaround for it, as quoted here
    "Intel Pentium with F0 0F bug - workaround enabled."
    which means that someone actually found the f0 0f bug, and decided to make a workaround for it.
  • Well, as it turns out, either one or more of the hard disks and/or the motherboard's IDE adapter is broken.

    If you buy crappy SCSI components they won't work properly either. Poor quality is not technology-specific.

    ...Screw this, I sez -- So I haul out a slower, older Adaptec 2940, plug in five surplus narrow SCSI devices, set IDs, set termination, off to the races.

    IDE should've been humanely put down years ago. Thank you, oh thank you, to the budget PC industry for forcing a twisted, augmented, Frankensteined hack of disk interface down my throat at every turn.

    Obviously, no one is forcing anything down anyone's throat, as you proved by dropping in a SCSI controller. Off to the races. IDE controllers are cheaper than dirt and there's no reason not to throw them onto motherboards.

    Why should we all have to pay an insanely high premium for disk space? For equivalent performance? SCSI has it's place, but it's not in the average 1 HD, 1 CD, non-server machine.

    I can't help but think what a difference it would have made to the PC world if someone (chipset or motherboard makers) had made SCSI onboard.

    They did. It wasn't faster, and it was much more expensive. The economics are really very simple. SCSI isn't getting shoved out because of lack of availability, it's losing because manufacturers are charging an arm and a leg for it.

    What is UP with SCSI, anyway? You pay an order of magnitude more for the controller, and 1.5-2x for every device thereafter. Sure, it's better tech, but nowhere close to TWICE as good. I can only picture some smug bastards at the hd companies cackling evilly at the folly of the users paying so much for technology that didn't cost them a penny more than IDE to make.

    No crufty or incompatible parallel devices, no brain-dead BIOS limitations, no DMA-that-isn't.

    Oh, this is an easy problem to fix. Simply set all your hardware on fire every 12 months, and buy the latest elegant, well-enginieered technology of the day.

    Better hardware is out there, you only have to pay for it. Me, I'm happy that we have the option of suffering a few quirks and paying MUCH less.

  • Actually, MS writes drivers for things like system chipsets (which commonly include the ATA interface) and things like monitors, etc.
  • I find it funny how the article says that this is another technology that Linux supported before Windows. Ignoring that fact that Windows had PCI, AGP, UltraDMA, Plug and Play, USB, Firewire, 3D acceleration, sound acceleration, SCSI, etc. all before Linux, I would like to point out why, for the near future, Windows will always have drivers for products before Linux. First, I would like to mention that this ATA100 support isn't an actual driver for a product, it is a driver adhering to a standard. Thus, this driver can be made before an actual product is on store shelves, because any controllers will adhere to the standard. Windows will always have the driver first, because no company in their right mind will release a PC product without Windows support. Barring a payoff from RedHat, the best a company will do for Linux is ship a driver in the box along with the Windows driver. The majority of the cases, however, involve a company releasing a Windows driver, people bitching, and the people finally going of to write their own driver. (In rare cases, the company may give up and just write the driver if the hardware is trivial enough or the company is desperate enough.) Thus, no matter what the hardware technology, Windows will have support first in the majority of cases, or at worst will have support at the same time. Now, when companies start shipping ATA100 controllers, Linux will take advantage of the ATA100 support built in, while MS can sit on its ass and know that company has already released Windows driver. To the end user, it wouldn't matter if Linux had support for ATA100 from version .99. To them, it seems that they have support at the same time.
  • Even for single drivers, ATA/66 is not a useless upgrade. Sure there are no drives that will stream at 66 MB/s to disc, but there are a lot that will hit 55 MB/s bursts. Harddrive transfer is rarely a steady process. Instead,t he transfer rate has a lot of spikes and dip. By capping the bursts at say 33 MB/s, you're effectively lowering the average transfer rate.
  • No - it is 15000 rpm now thanx to the new Seagate Cheetah 15X. This drives is a killer !
  • Firewire runs at 1/2 the speed of ATA/100. Firewire is a serial link and thus measured in bits per second. It runs at 400 megabits per second, or about 50 MB/sec. ATA/100 is a parallel interface and measured in megabytes per second, and it runs at 100 megabytes per second. Barring that, Firewire is pretty crappy at this stage. Even a firewire network link (as featured in Sony VAIO PCs) cannot keep up with 100 megbits per second ethernet.
  • First of all, as stated by some others, Windows has already had ATA 100 support.

    Which I wasn't disputing.

    IBM's latest IDE release, the 75GXP, maxes out at 37MB/s sustained ...

    Ok, I stand corrected; ATA/66 does have some use then. ATA/100 is still completely worthless to anyone but marketing types, and is likely to remain so for its service lifetime.

    SCSI 160 is bogus at this point, ignoring the fact you will need 4 of either of the above mentioned 2 drives to max the throughput.

    And I can fly, ignoring the fact that gravity pulls me down.

    Point being: That is a pretty big fact to ignore there! Wide SCSI supports up to sixteen devices on the bus at a time, all of which can have operations pending at once (unlike ATA). So, unlike ATA, you can very much use the full potential of SCSI Ultra160. In fact, we could use more bus bandwidth!

    The problem is that it requires a 64bit PCI slot which no mainstream consumer level board carries.

    That sounds an awful lot like "640K should be enough for anybody!" to me.

    First, about five years ago, no mainstream consumer-level board had PCI slots at all. I am sure we will see 64-bit PCI in consumer systems soon enough.

    Second, anyone buying four super-fast hard drives is probably not going to be putting them in their 80386 with 4MB of RAM. They will likely have either 66 MHz PCI slots, 64-bit PCI slots, or both.

    (For example, one system we have in our integration room right now has four PCI buses with two slots each. Two of those buses are 64-bit. That same system has eight high-speed drives on two Ultra160 SCSI buses using only one IRQ. Do that with ATA!)

    32bit PCI which we all have has a theoretical limit of 133MB/s for the whole bus.

    First, don't use "all". Speak for yourself.

    Second, if 32-bit PCI is such a limit, isn't ATA/100 kind of pushing things? Won't serial ATA be completely pointless?

    Hey, let's all go back to Tandy TRS-80s and Apple ][e's, this new stuff is too fast!

    The release of USB2 will eliminate almost all of SCSI's external peripherals, except for highend hard drives.

    USB2 is still vaporware right now. SCSI Ultra160 you can buy today.

    Personally, I think USB is appropriate for devices like scanners, cameras, and the like. I think SCSI is more appropriate for hard drives, tape drives, and other mass storage systems.

    Most current gen IDE drives do support command queuing. Whether or not it actually works is anyone's guess...

    Another thing to love about ATA: Nobody knows if you're actually getting the performance you should or not!

    The reason ATA CDROM drives used to kill system performance was due to a lack of DMA, not because IDE could only access one device per bus at a time. The advent of DMA has elminated this bottleneck.

    Then why does ATA CD-ROM multi-tasking performance still blow chunks, when SCSI systems barely even notice the load? Could it be because the whole ATA subsystem has to STOP and wait for the CD-ROM to complete its transaction before that bus can become free again?

    ATA sucks, pure and simple. Rather then putting money into trying to extend a dead technology, the industry should just switch to SCSI, which is (1) here today (2) widely used (3) a standard and (4) actually works.
  • Huh??? what are you talking about???

    At my previous job (sysadmin) I installed Redhat 6.0 on a 27GB IBM ATA/66 hard disk without any problem. Just make sure you're set the specific hard disk in the BIOS to LBA.., and it works perfectly!

  • You, my friend, are mistaken on several points.
    >>>>>>>
    Amazing, yet more wasted bandwidth on desktop systems.
    >>>>>
    ATA 100 is not wasted bandwidth. Sure no harddrive exists that can do a 100 (or even 66) MB/sec sequential transfer, but many exist that can do burst transfers over 50 MB/sec. These burst rates will only get faster in future drives. Harddrive transfers are full of bursts and sags and by capping the bursts, you lower transfer rate.

    So tell me again why we are getting faster IDE speeds rather
    than moving to something like SCSI or IEEE 1394 (Firewire)? IDE blows if you're concerned with speed, 66 and 100mhz are
    fine if you're running several devices simultaneously but IDE doesn't do that does it? No. We'd be fine with PIO 4 since even
    7200rpm hard drives can barely max out that bandwidth.
    >>>>>>>>>>
    We are getting faster IDE speeds rather than moving, because
    A) IDE doesn't suck, and B) We are already using it. Its like saying why not ditch UNIX because it is so cruffty. Sure there is better designs out there for OSs (I doubt anybody claims UNIX is the most academically perfect OS in existance) but people continue to use it because it is too much of a pain to start over. Plus, the alternatives suck worse. SCSI is expensive, and Firewire is half the speed of ATA/100 (400 mbps = 50MB/sec) and does even worse because it has trouble delivering that kind of bandwidth to a random access device. Lastly, PIO 4 would not be as good because
    A) It doesn't do DMA, and B) Again, 7200 harddrives can burst faster than that (hell, most can now do sequential transfers faster than that.)

    Keeping IDE alive longer is pissing me off, why can't we move onto some more efficient standards? The Serial STS is an option, as is Firewire.
    >>>>>>>
    I'm not sure what serial STS is, but I do know there is a serial ATA standard in the works that should put SCSI to shame. Also, again, firewire is not an option. It is slower than even ATA66, and has trouble giving harddrives (or even ethernet cards. The VAIO PC has a firewire network interface and it doesn't stand up to 100mbps ethernet) bandwidth. Again, we're not moving to them because it is not worth the trouble (Rarely do ATA users have more than two harddrives, and ATA handles them fine.) You fail to see the point of ATA. It is not the standard that really holds ATA down (at least in ATA's target market of single to dual drives), because these days ATA is approaching SCSI in effeciency. The main problem are the drives. If you engineered an ATA version of the fastest SCSI drive available, it would be almost as fast as the SCSI version, and it would cost just as much. People don't move to SCSI because of the cost, so what have you gained?

    Imagine if VA or
    LinuxCOmputers could ship FW enabled systems, they would make as much headway as Apple has with them. I bet many
    companies would even write up Linux drivers for their equipment since it is a viable platform that more people are migrating to.
    >>>>>>
    This comment shows two things.
    1) You don't understand the point of ATA. ATA is not for multi drive monster servers, it is for a the workstation that has one or two drives in it.
    2) You are delusional about the state of Linux. If companies didn't rush to develop drivers for Apple during its huge growth period during iMac season (not the mention the fact that there are many many more Mac users out there) what makes you think companies will support Linux?
  • The reason I believe one does not need to get SCSI, though, is that most users do not use their system in a way that would actually justify the SCSI bus.

    This is true. Most people don't multitask, or don't do it very well. Then again, most people are running Windows, which doesn't multitask, or doesn't do it very well.

    While the nature of the bus is faster, it takes certain situations to actually need it.

    Like burning CDs on a 486 while listening to MP3s and browsing with Netscape? (Done it.) Or a fairly extreme example I gave to someone else today: take my all-SCSI computer, with its CD-ROM and CD-R drives, add a DVD-ROM and a DVD-RAM drive, and I can burn a CD-R, burn a DVD-RAM, rip an audio CD and watch a DVD movie all at the same time. Try that with IDE; you'll get buffer underruns, your movie will skip, and so will your MP3s.

    Then we have the games issue, which few people think about when choosing IDE or SCSI. Does your favorite game access the hard drive while you're playing? Think about that for a second...

    So who needs SCSI? Anybody who does more than one thing at a time with their computers.
    ---

  • Anyway I am going Adaptec 29160N and Quantumn Atlas 18.4Gb 160 scsi. screw ide.

    Second that. Up until two days ago, I was getting really annoyed with having to pay a 1.5-2x premium for SCSI hard disks. Then I tried to set up a system with three hard disks and one CD-ROM, all IDE/ATA.

    Well, as it turns out, either one or more of the hard disks and/or the motherboard's IDE adapter is broken. Nothing at all functions as a Secondary Slave (without appearing to the system as either a 32TB drive or an IDE floppy or something even wierder) nor will the CD-ROM function unless it's set up as a master device. This wasn't Linux-specific either: it happened in BIOS, in Windows, in FreeBSD....

    So I decided to try installing an old Future Domain IDE controller, only to discover that FreeBSD won't recognize anything plugged into the third or fourth IDE adapters. Arg! Screw this, I sez -- So I haul out a slower, older Adaptec 2940, plug in five surplus narrow SCSI devices, set IDs, set termination, off to the races.

    IDE should've been humanely put down years ago. Thank you, oh thank you, to the budget PC industry for forcing a twisted, augmented, Frankensteined hack of disk interface down my throat at every turn. It's even infected the low-end workstations, too (Apple, Sun, SGI). I can't help but think what a difference it would have made to the PC world if someone (chipset or motherboard makers) had made SCSI onboard. No crufty or incompatible parallel devices, no brain-dead BIOS limitations, no DMA-that-isn't.

    Between IDE and the holdovers from the PC-XT and PC-AT (fifteen interrupts, half of which are already gone? 640k base memory limits? the ISA bus?)....

  • Re:Another Case where Linux Beat Microsoft??? (Score:3)

    by mj ( 123061 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @05:53PM (#1020639)
    I have to agree on this one.
    I have an ATA66 controller and drivers for Linux were over 1/2 a year later than the MS ones.
    As for installing NT on an ATA66 drive? It was a breeze, just read the directions. Its not that hard. I was able to install 98 and NT on an ata66 drive.
    linux however, didn't like it... nice to see linux may be on the ball for ata100 though! :)

  • Re:ATA/100 products (Score:3)

    by Zoyd ( 13778 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @06:26PM (#1020643)
    Lazy Jones:
    IBM has the Deskstar 75GXP series

    Yes, they do, but it's not ATA/100 . . . at least, not according to IBM [ibm.com]:

    Configuration

    Interface ATA ATA
    Capacity (GB) 75/60/45/30/20/15 40/30/20
    Sector size (bytes) 512 512
    Recording zone 15 15
    User cylinders (physical) 27,724 34,326
    Data heads (physical) 10/8/6/4/3/2 4/3/2
    Data disks 5/4/3/2/2/1 2/2/1
    Max. areal density (Gbits/sq. inch) 11.0 14.5
    Max. recording density (BPI) 391,000 415,000
    Track density (TPI) 28,350 35,000

    Performance

    Data buffer 2 2 MB 512 KB 2
    Rotational speed (RPM) 7200 5400
    Latency (average ms) 4.17 5.56
    Media transfer rate (max Mbits/sec) 444 372
    Interface transfer rate (max MB/sec) 66.6+ 66.6+
    Sustained data rate (MB/sec) 37 32
    Seek time 3 (read typical)
    Average (ms) 8.5 9.5
    Track-to-track (ms) 1.2 1.6
    Full-track (ms) 15.0 16.0


  • And just for the record, Linux has USB support, whereas I try to plug a USB device into Windows NT, and...

    Nothing!

    Note: The above is sarcasm, illustrating where Linux really competes with Microsoft and what its real capabilities are. Can anyone confirm that Win2K doesn't support USB, either? Surely it does, being the Largest Software Project Ever(tm)...

  • Well, I'm sure he likes to think of himself as 'normal folk'. Like it or not, Bill honnestly believes himself to be righteous... We all know how devious he is, but he doesn't.

  • Re:ATA/100 products (Score:4)

    by yuggoth ( 85136 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @11:34PM (#1020655)

    Yes, they do, but it's not ATA/100 . . . at least, not according to IBM:

    Interface transfer rate (max MB/sec) 66.6+ 66.6+

    Actually, it is. The ATA/100 interface wasn't officially introduced until monday. HD and chip manufacturers who had their ATA/100 products finished had to wait until Quantum gave them official permission. By calling the interface ATA/66+, IBM was able to get around this restriction. Technically, ther is no difference between ATA/66+ and ATA/100, so I expect IBM to change the name soon (after all, 100 sounds faster than 66, even with a plus sign...:-)

    Check out this article [heise.de] on Heise Online for more information. It is in German, so you may want to use Babelfish [altavista.com].

  • I have worked on a Fibre Channel RAID card and I find this whole ATA vs. SCSI discussion strange. It is obvious that SCSI is better. More devices, better throughput. Fibre Channel takes it farther with even more devices and even better throughput.
    The card I worked on did 190 MB/sec, 23,000 I/Os per second in direct connect mode. It did even better with RAID.
    32-bit PCI? I assume you mean 33 Mhz as well. This is worthless in the server market. A good server should have multiple 64-bit 66 Mhz buses. Each bus has a max of 528 MB/sec. Two of our cards can run at max speed with a very high number of drives on it. I have run with over 300 drives on one card in direct connect mode. 32-bit PCI slots should be at least 66 Mhz and should only hang around for legacy stuff. PCI-X and Infiniband are coming soon.
    In the real world of enterprise I/O, ATA and frankly SCSI, are a joke. 15 drives plus a controller? Please. Never mind the four drives that IDE gives you.
    As for FireWire and USB...well when I see it in the storage market, I will believe it. Fibre Channel is the king of enterprise storage. SCSI will do it for lower level servers and ATA/IDE will do it for small systems like PCs. It is a step in the right direction for ATA drivers and hardware to support true busmaster DMA. Many IDE type devices eat up CPU by not supporting DMA or only supporting slave DMA. Yuck. Still, if SCSI is better than ATA and FC is better than SCSI, why even make anything other than FC? The answer: Money!
    I can't stand storage manufactures selling various levels of technology so that they can make a massive profit on their high end stuff. It is no different then Intel releasing a fast totally expensive chip and then a slower but cheaper chip. Does the fast chip cost more to make? Nope. Does FC cost that much more than SCSI? Does SCSI cost that much more than ATA/IDE? This is why good technology takes so long to get into the people's hands.
  • RAID comes in three forms: Software, Controller, and External.
    Software RAID is done by the OS/kernel/file system driver. It can give you the protection of RAID but much of the performance of multiple drives may be lost in host CPU running the RAID.
    Controller RAID is done by a add-in card usually PCI, usually SCSI or Fibre Channel. There are IDE RAID card but with only four devices and IDE performance...why make the effort? I worked on a Fibre Channel RAID card. Hook this card up to a rack of hard disks and the OS only knew about the virtual RAID disks we presented. We defaulted to RAID 10 by the by.
    External RAID is the kind done by companies like EMC. Here, a massive cabinet of drives have a target mode controller(s) built in. Plug in a regular controller into the cabinet and the controller only sees the virtual RAID disks.
    Many of the ideas that you are talking about are already used in RAID today. The placement of the data is important to how fast it can be accessed. Another big issue is cache. Many RAID controllers have 16-64 MB of cache. The often use both read and write cache.
    Now, to put all of this in small inexpensive unit would be interesting. Some EMC boxes are the 6 ' X 2' X 2' and cost $500,000. I personally think that a good RAID FC controller running RAID 10 connected to Seagate Cheetah drives are your best bet.
  • You are very mistaken on your supposed counterpoints. IDE is inferior to SCSI and FW in many ways, most specifically that it only allows one channel to speak at any one time. This means if I have my CD-ROm and hard drive on the same IDE cable they have to use burst transfer to a DMA buffer to transfer data back and forth. This is horribly inefficient especially in lowend workstations who may only be using one IDE channel at any given time. SCSI and FW (FW is actually based on SCSI and is merely a serial implimentation of it) devices can all talk at the same time which actually allows you to maximize your bandwidth. SCSI is artificially expensive, the price of the chips in a SCSI drive are about the same as those in an IDE drive, manufacturers just set higher margins because of a lack of demand. If tomorrow everyone bought a SCSI drive next week the price would drop very quickly. Sticking with a standard because it's already in use is sort of ironic isn't it. People say move to Linux/Mac/Be because you don't need to follow convention yet insist that we ought to be using severely outdated technology in our computers. Strange. Do you know the real difference between a SCSI and ATA hard drive? The pin arrangement and controller chip. Don't bother responding unless you really have a wonderful insight.
  • At my previous job (sysadmin) I installed Redhat 6.0 on a 27GB IBM ATA/66 hard disk without any problem. Just make sure you're set the specific hard disk in the BIOS to LBA.., and it works perfectly!

    32GB limit in the 2.2 kernel. Fixed in 2.2.14.

    --Dan
  • You are correct - in an IDE only one device per channel can be worked with. In the SCSI world each drive disconnects from the bus after it has received it's commands, finds the data, and then reconnects to the controller card to transfer it. My Adaptec 2930 can handle up to some 250 commands at once.

    This is probably why SCSI has been used in the server market over IDE. All those different user requests for data can be easily stacks and handled quickly and intelligently by the SCSI controller. In an IDE world they would be handled on a first come-first server basis. This forces small, easy to manage file requests to become backed up behind larger requests.

    If you have the money SCSI is nice.

  • Trying to install Red Hat 6.0 and get it to do RAID with the ATA/66 ports on my Abit BE6/Celery 366 (Didn't even try to boot from them).

    The farce went as follows:

    With the proper lilo command line arguments to recognize the 3rd and 4th IDE interfaces, /dev/hde through /dev/hdh, the two 20Gig, 7200RPM Maxstor drives intended as RAID ran at about 1.5MB/s each, 2.8 MB/s together, in a high-level compatability mode. No PIO. No "ATA/66".

    Found the IDE patches needed to run the HPT366 interfaces. They required the latest kernel, not Red Hat's, uh-uh, not available for that old kernel. Downloaded the new kernel from kernel.org.

    After patching and recompiling the latest kernel - not available from RH of course - RAID stopped working. Guess what! Wunnerful Red Hat had decided to patch their kernel - I want to say, as opposed to the linux kernel - to have the latest beta RAID code - and tools. Since the raidtools were now too new for the kernel code they broke on the old code in the new kernel.

    Naturally Red Hat did not deign to mention these changes anywhere at all in the documention on their web site, etc... Naw. Gosh, why would anyone ever want to upgrade their kernel? Well, at least the drives ran at 20MB/sec now! Almost there, almossst therrrre...

    Got the old raid tools, ripped out Redhat's raidtools RPM, and did a make, reboot...

    Whee - the two 20MB/s drives together, striped, gave - 22MB/s. Yeah, software RAID is as good as Hardware. Sure. Didn't matter if one or both drives was on the ATA/33 Intel BX ports, or on the same or other HPT366 port either. 22MB/s, period.

    Okay, find documentation claiming the beta raid patches are still good on the newer kernel. Install them, put the Red Hat raidtools back. remake kernel etc...

    Wow! Now get 35MB/s on the RAID stripe set!!!

    ... for about 8 seconds. Then "lost interrupt... lost interrupt..." - computer hangs, dead.

    Moral: Don't assume new linux patches work with any feature other than themselves - even those features they have to work with to be worth a damn.

  • Re:Another Case where Linux Beat Microsoft??? (Score:4)

    by thechink ( 182419 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @06:02PM (#1020669)
    Well, windows 9x might have, NT is a different story. To install NT 4 (and windows 2000) on a ATA/66 drive. Well, guess what? HAL didn't (and doesn't) support ATA/66. I had to re-arange the entire IDE setup of the computer. Sure, after I had NT installed, I didn't have a problem, I could install the driver, then move the drive over....

    Sigh, W2K supports ATA-66 right out of the box, never had a problem and I've already done a number of installs. As for NT you have to install the ATA-66 driver like a SCSI driver by pressing F6 at the beginning of the installation. It's all in the docs.

  • Has anyone heard of harddisks with built-in RAID (yet)? Technically it wouldn't be difficult to implement, just a new controller board onto an existing hard disk. Just make sure the disk is multi-platter. I believe there are people who would rather have a fast drive rather than a big one.

    Hey, has anyone tried hardware-hacking harddisks yet? Wow, I can think of novel RAID formatting schemes right now! e.g. to reduce track to track movement time, one could implement tracks 1-80 on platter 1 and reverse the order on platter 2. or a hack to double effective spindle rates by applying the same princple, but sector wise.

  • Another Case where Linux Beat Microsoft??? (Score:3)

    by Sean Hermany ( 4507 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @04:37PM (#1020682)
    That quote in the news post is rather
    frustrating. Another case where linux beats
    Microsoft to a new technology standard? As I
    recall it took quite some time for the linux
    kernel to do udma32, while Windows supported it
    very quickly.

  • Speed is good, but is there demand? (Score:5)

    by StudentAction.CA ( 167871 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @04:38PM (#1020683) Homepage
    Right now, IBM has the (only?) ATA/100 drive on the market. Here's something I found at maximumpc.com

    Similar to the adoption of ATA/66, ATA/100 support will first come to market with add-in PCI cards before being integrated into motherboard chipsets.

    So the real issue isn't if Linux supports it, it's when/if the motherboard manufactures get on the ball and start making ATA/100 interfaces.
    Now on another point, I found this while looking at the ATA/100 anounce at www.linux-ide.org:

    Bridging the Gap to Serial ATA The Ultra ATA/100 interface provides a critical technology bridge between ATA/66 and the future availability of the Serial ATA interface, which is currently under development. Serial ATA has industry-wide support and is expected to be widely deployed in new computer systems by 2005. In the meantime, Ultra ATA/100 will provide mature technologies to meet the heightened throughput demands that large, complex files are placing on desktop systems. Once these higher performance systems and drives become available, the Ultra ATA/100 interface will require less time to boot a computer system and open applications.

    My real question is "IS THERE A NEED FOR THIS?" I still have all standard ATA/33 drives, and none of my motherboards (all bought in the last year) have ATA/66 support. When serial ATA comes out, then I can see the need. I know the need is there is servers, but is there a real need on the desktop? Linux and windows run fast on my K6-III 400 with a 5400 RPM ATA/33.

    Sure I'd like ATA/100, but the focus should be on getting wide acceptance for the current standard (ATA/66) before moving to the next one (ATA/100). If we just "keep moving forward" and always upgrading the interface, but then users are left in a constant upgrade cycle, with no clear standards. (The 3D card market, anyone?)

    All in all, this is a great move for linux. Glad to see good 'ol Tux can beat M$ to the punch. I just don't want to see customers get screwed by constant upgrade cycles.

  • Here is the real question though. Do you really think that it costs that much more to make a great car as they charge for it? If they made the profit margins for a Ferrari the same as a Toyota, they would cost a lot less.
    The same could be said for storage technology and most technology in general. The fact is FC and SCSI have higher profit margins than IDE. RAID cabinets have even higher margins. In this case, what is true for hardware can be true for software. Take Windows 9x vs. NT/2k. Microsoft will tell you that NT Workstation/Win2k Pro is 8X more stable than Win9x. Then why do they even make 9x? They have admitted that it is not stable. Basically, they fixed the bugs in 9x and made it a new product that costs much more. Thanks but no thanks.
    One of the things that I love about Linux is that there aren't cheap buggy versions and expensive good versions; there is just one inexpensive, great version. When something is fixed it is fixed for all.
    It would be more ethical if companies just made one good version of a type of product rather than staged levels of quality and cost. It would be better for the people. Sadly, it does not make good business sense and therefore will probably never happen.
  • [ATA/100 is] worthless now, but it makes more sense to release a standard a year before you need it as opposed to a year after.

    I suspect it will take more like 20 to 30 months for hard drive throughput to actually reach speeds that justify ATA/100. And ATA/100 is just supposed to be a quick fix until Serial ATA arrives. Or at least, that's what Intel would have you believe.

    Me: Wide SCSI supports up to sixteen devices on the bus at a time.

    You: 15, the SCSI card is included as a device.

    Sixteen devices. A SCSI host adapter is a device. You can have any number of SCSI host adapters on a bus, from zero to sixteen. This is vital in a fault-tolerant situation.

    Me: In fact, we could use more bus bandwidth!

    You: Who's we? Speak for yourself.

    Touche.

    In this case, "we" is the SCSI community. You can saturate Ultra160 SCSI with just four or five drives these days, even though the bus supports up to sixteen devices.

    The rest of your post shows that you obviously don't know who ATA drives are intended for. IDE is a consumer level product, plain and simple.

    If ATA is supposed to be such a low-end technology, then why do they keep trying to extend it? That's my whole point. Why invent new standards which are not as good as existing standards which already do a better job?

    Show me one motherboard available for any current AMD/Intel CPU that doesn't have at least 1 32bit PCI slot.

    Funny, you're proving my point.

    If you were paying attention to the thread of conversation, you would know that you were objecting to SCSI Ultra160 because it needs 64-bit or 66 MHz PCI to actually use that kind of speed, and that "no one" has that kind of hardware.

    I replied saying that, not long ago, no one had PCI at all.

    You replied saying that these days, everyone does.

    Do you see the progression? Or do I need to draw you a picture?

    Though Firewire will probably take some of the storage market.

    Firewire's nice in environments where you need very low latency (i.e., real-time data acquisition), and for systems like digital cameras where you disconnect things a lot. For disk and tape I/O, Ultra160 SCSI is still quite a bit faster, though.

    Try busmastering drivers, they work wonders. I don't know what you are doing to make your system grind to a hault using a CDROM drive.

    When are you going to get it through your skull that this is due to design flaw in the ATA bus, and has nothing to do with the drivers?

    The problem is ATA doesn't support disconnection.

    When an ATA device is busy, the other device on the bus cannot be used.

    If you have a CD-RW drive, a DVD drive, a Zip drive, and a hard drive (a very reasonable scenario, even for these "home users" you keep using to apologize for ATA's bad design), then you're going to run into those sorts of problems. It doesn't matter how good your drivers are.

    Not everyone has the money to buy a $700 motherboard plus $2000+ for hard drives like you do.

    You just don't get it, do you? The only reason SCSI equipment costs more (and it isn't that much more, BTW) is volume. Rather then trying to push ATA still further into an area where, by your own admission, it wasn't designed for, why don't we just switch to SCSI and get it over with?

  • SCSI? (Score:3)

    by xercist ( 161422 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @04:43PM (#1020689) Homepage
    How does ATA/100 compare with SCSI in speed? Reliability? Price? Always nice to see better standards, but is this just a better part of a lesser standard? I've never been a big fan of IDE...

    Of course, this is still great for the cheaper alternative.


    --
  • As I understand it (having read a bunch on this elsewhere) the 66.6+ is an alias for 100 so as to not step on Quantums toes...
  • Microsoft doesn't write drivers. They rely on vendors to do that. Yes, they provide some scaffolding, but in this particular instance, it's completely an IDE driver thing.
    -russ
  • ABIT [gentus.com] announced this support some time ago... check out the press release from May 5th, 2000 [gentus.com]

    Time flies like an arrow;
  • I think it's great that Linux has ATA/100 drivers before Micro$oft. However, ATA/100 interfaces are currently useless and I think will continue to be useless for sometime. The last time I checked the latest drives couldn't burst much more than 30-40 megs per sec. Do a sequential read and maybe they can sustain 20 or so megs per sec. Do a random read test and that number drops dramatically.

    So, my question is, what's the point of having an interface that can support 100 megs per sec when the fastest drives can do a burst of around 40 megs per sec? Even someone who has a drive that can burst 40 megs per sec, will not notice a speed decrease when going back to ATA/33 since the sustained transfer rates will be below 33 megs per sec.

  • Gratz SuSE, but... (Score:3)

    by stevens ( 84346 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @04:55PM (#1020715) Homepage

    I use and love SuSE, and I'm glad for their efforts.

    But how can you seriously say "Again Linux beats Microsoft" in the hardware realm when, AFAIK, no distros even ship atm with USB in the standard kernel?

    I'm all for the love of hacking together a solution, but I'm pretty busy, and don't want to spend weekends anymore hacking together good 3d video support, USB support, etc. (SuSE put ATA/66 into my kernel before it was in the main branch--thanks!) I'm not sure that a source patch tarball counts as 'support' when most of the linux users nowadays wait until their fave distro supports the feature.

    Sure, I'd put it in myself if I owned an ATA/100 IBM drive, but it's summer, and I'd resent the time it took :-)

    Steve

  • Well, windows 9x might have, NT is a different story. To install NT 4 (and windows 2000) on a ATA/66 drive.
    While we're depositing our pennies, I may as well say that I installed Windows 2000 Pro on an ATA/66 system with no problems. Maybe you were using a beta release? I guess YMMV.
  • Win2k does indeed support USB. And win2k is essentially a marketing name for NT 5.0, so Windows NT has supported USB for about 6 months now.

    Actually, NT 4.0 has had USB support since 1998, I believe. However, Microsoft decided not to release the updates which enabled that support, preferring to use it as a level to force you to upgrade to Windows 2000.

    I'm sure the fact that Linux also lacked good USB support had something to do with it.

    Got that? Unless they have competition, Microsoft cares nothing about you or your desire to use the technologies you want.

    Give me Linux any day.
  • Umm..you do realize that you "Win" nothing as Windows already has drivers for ATA/100 ?

  • http://www.g amepc.com/reviews/hardware_review.asp?review=ka710 0&page=1 [gamepc.com]

    They have a review of the KA7 with the ATA/100 support. It also, apparently has support on the controller for IDE RAID.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • I happily removed myself from the contant upgrade cycle years ago by committing to only use 8-bit MFM Hard disk controllers. Sure my system is hellaciously noisy, since I'm using a whole stack of Seagate ST-225 20 meg hard drives, and the 65 mSec access time is a bit slow, but I can plug in a drive manufactured years ago, often without losing throughput. It's a bit of a hassle getting started, of course, as few distros give you a pre-compiled kernel with the '8-bit controller' option enabled. But it's definitely worth it in the long run!
  • Everyone that is complaining that ATA-66 and ATA-100 arn't much faster than ATA-33, you are missing the point.

    Single drive speed can range from anywhere between 20-31Mb/s (b or B? I can't remember). The truth of the matter is, most people do not exceed their IDE controller's maximum bandwidth. An ATA-66 or ATA-100 controller allows bursts of up to those speeds, because data is temporarily stored in the hard drive or controller cache during that short burst period. In practice however, most people see speeds in the 20's range due to random seeking/reading/writing.

    ATA-66 made a big difference for me in drive speed for my squid proxy server, where bursts happen frequently. Drive speed is well below the ATA-66 maximum bandwidth, but my IDE bus has sufficient room for regular bursts which help in speed.

    When ATA-66 was first released, Thresh's Firing Squad [firingsquad.com] put up some benchmarks comparing ATA-33 to ATA-66, showing considerable speed improvements in ATA-66. These were synthetic tests showing best case scenarios.... but in practice most people on desktops will not notice much of a difference. In a more recent review of the Abit KA7-100 I believe on HardOCP [hardocp.com], the reviewer spoke highly of the potential of the ATA-100 on the KA7-100 motherboard, when he was not too impressed by ATA-66.

Slashdot Top Deals

Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Close