[NTLUG:Discuss] Hard drive question

Fred James fredjame at concentric.net
Thu Aug 29 07:45:13 CDT 2002


If it makes a difference, it is a 120 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM - 
couldn't find anything that said it was incompatible, though I did see 
that it might want to be on its own IDE.
Space is more the issue for me than speed, but I am sure I wouldn't mind 
having both.
Not looking at RAID just yet.
I'll look into a PCI card.
Thank you.

Daniel Hauck wrote:

> In general, I would say everything should be just fine.  But I don't 
> know how large your drive is.  The ATA/100 mode most likely will not 
> be used and I have had only rare instances where compatibility 
> problems surfaces from that and these were limited to one drive not 
> wanting to work when connected to the same controller as another.  You 
> don't mention the capacity of the ATA/100 drives so I can't comment on 
> that.  But if you want access to the speed you want, I would recommend 
> buying a PCI controller that supports the speed.  If you can find one 
> that does only ATA/100 you will find it will be cheap.  I picked one 
> up from CompUSA for like $10.  It worked nicely too... running a Linux 
> software RAID on it.  (There's some trivia associated with that too -- 
> it seems that the Promise Fastrak 100 controller is merely a software 
> RAID controller in the first place -- I discovered that when I wanted 
> to use my Promise RAID controller with my RedHat 7.3 and they wouldn't 
> supply the drivers soon enough... I looked into it and finally 
> realized that it's all driven by software.  I went out to find a PCI 
> controller (Maxtor ATA/100) and realized that the Maxtor and the 
> Fasttrak 100 were IDENTICAL!!!  The only difference was the BIOS on 
> board!)
>
>  
>
> Anyway... I guess I'm going off in a different direction... it's 
> 06:30... go figure.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>     ----- Original Message -----
>
>     From: Fred James <mailto:fredjame at concentric.net>
>
>     To:Discuss North Texas Linux Users Group <mailto:discuss at ntlug.org>
>
>     Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 06:18
>
>     Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Hard drive question
>
>
>     Will I be able to run an ATA/100 hard drive on my 1998 motherboard?
>     Would upgrading the BIOS be of any benefit?
>     Does upgrading the BIOS dangerous in terms of OS and data already
>     on the hard drive?
>
>     Elitegroup P6BX-A+ motherboard
>     Award BIOS v4.51PG
>
>     (the following information is from:
>     <http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/193/1/> )
>
>     The specifications of the P6BX-A+ are as follows:
>
>         * Chipset: Intel 440BX processor
>         * CPU: Intel Celeron, Pentium II & Pentium III
>         * Bios: Award
>         * RAM: 3 DIMM - Max 768MB
>         * Slot: 2 ISA, 5 PCI, 1 ISA/PCI shared and 1 AGP
>
>         I/O:
>
>         * One - EPP/ECP mode parallel port
>         * Two - 16550 high-speed serial I/O ports
>         * Supports 360K~2.88M Byte, 3 Mode FDDs or LS120
>         * Dual PCI IDE interfaces - PIO mode 4, DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA 33
>         * PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connectors
>         * ATX Power Supply Connector
>         * Two USB connectors
>
>-- 
>small is beautiful
>

-- 
small is beautiful


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ntlug.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20020829/6e39e615/attachment.html


More information about the Discuss mailing list