[NTLUG:Discuss] Hard drive question

[Daniel Hauck]

The 120MB should work fine but again I warn against possible
incompatibilities not between the motherboard and the drive, but between two
drives on the same chain.  There are times when it can't be avoided so if
this drive will operate solo, I give you a 99% chance of success on that.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Fred James
  To: discuss at ntlug.org
  Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 07:45
  Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] Hard drive question


  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
      To:Discuss North Texas Linux Users Group
      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:

        a.. Chipset: Intel 440BX processor
        b.. CPU: Intel Celeron, Pentium II & Pentium III
        c.. Bios: Award
        d.. RAM: 3 DIMM - Max 768MB
        e.. Slot: 2 ISA, 5 PCI, 1 ISA/PCI shared and 1 AGP
          I/O:

        a.. One - EPP/ECP mode parallel port
        b.. Two - 16550 high-speed serial I/O ports
        c.. Supports 360K~2.88M Byte, 3 Mode FDDs or LS120
        d.. Dual PCI IDE interfaces - PIO mode 4, DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA 33
        e.. PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connectors
        f.. ATX Power Supply Connector
        g.. Two USB connectors
-- small is beautiful

--
small is beautiful

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