nick.rout at gmail
Jul 28, 2012, 2:14 AM
Post #8 of 10
(714 views)
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First I want to say thanks for all the replies, the fact I have
replied to Stephen doesn't mean the other posts were unworthy of
acknowledgement.
On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Stephen Worthington
<stephen_agent [at] jsw> wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 13:21:41 +1200, you wrote:
>
>>My backend needs more storage. It has no more sata ports, and no more
>>PCI/PCIe slots to put in a SATA card.
>>
>>It does have a spare IDE header on the motherboard. Is there an
>>adaptor that I can use to convert the motherboard's IDE header to a
>>sata drive? Google kinda tells me there is, but I can't find any
>>locally, and there is a deal of confusion from my google searches. The
>>confusion is between adaptors that allow you to use a IDE drive on a
>>SATA motherboard on the one hand, and what I want (SATA drive on IDE
>>motherboard) on the other hand.
>>
>>Alternatively PCIe to 4 sata port card that works with linux (I have a
>>PCIe to two SATA port at present).
>>
>>Or a source of IDE 2 or 3 TB hard drives?
>
> I would also recommend the ST Lab S-250 put a SATA drive on a PATA
> cable. I have two of them in my OS/2 box.
You still run OS/2? Wow, I remember getting a free copy of warp on
floppies on a magazine years ago. I liked it, couldn't understand a
lot of it. People claim that OS/2 boxes have been accidentally sealed
up in cupboards and left running for years without intervention. I
also seem to recall that there was some open source software like
sendmail available for it?
> It they work in OS/2, they
> will certainly work in Linux! Do not buy the ST Lab S-240, that is
> for putting PATA drives on SATA cables. I have tried another of the
> SATA <-> PATA converters that is supposed to be bi-directional that I
> got from Dick Smith or Jaycar. It gave me lots of trouble, which all
> went away when I replaced it with an S-250. The SATA interface on the
> S-250 (and all SATA <-> PATA converters) is only SATA I (1.5 Gbit/s),
> but that is still faster than the PATA cable can do anyway.
>
> When I ran out of slots on my old motherboard, I moved my tuners to
> USB ones to free up a PCIe x 1 slot for a two port SATA card.
Actually I realised that the PCI slots are taken up by DVB-S cards
that I am not currently using as I have 2 HDHRs. I could put a PCI
Sata cards in there. Would still like to make good use of the IDE port
though.
> For a
> four port SATA card you normally need a PCIe x 4 slot or better,
> unfortunately. I would expect most to work in Linux, as the same
> chips are also used on motherboards. Watch out for the drive
> addresses rearranging themselves when you add PCIe SATA cards - I
> found my card became /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and displaced the internal
> SATA ports up two letters.
>
I use exclusively UUIDs in fstab so that should not be a problem.
Saves a lot of headaches.
> In my case, I was using a PVR case that could take full ATX
> motherboards, so when my old uATX motherboard became unstable, I chose
> a new standard ATX one with 6 onboard SATA ports, 2 eSATA ports. It
> also has up to 4 USB 3.0 ports (2 on the back panel) which can be used
> for USB 3.0 external hard disks. I have not tried USB 3.0 hard disks
> with Linux yet, but the specs say the interface should be almost as
> fast as SATA (5 Gbit/s vs 6 Gbits/s, which is faster than all hard
> drives (except maybe SSDs). I also have an extra PCIe x 16 slot, so I
> could add an 8 port SATA/eSATA card if that ultimately became
> necessary. So I now have 3 internal hard disks in the case (all it
> will fit), two drives on SATA cables hanging out the back of the case
> (on the internal power supply), and one eSATA drive in an external
> drive mount. Which still leaves me with one more eSATA port and the
> USB 3.0 ports.
>
Actually when reading the list after posting, and looking at the
offerings I thought about upgrading the motherboard and processor. I
bought this backend box at a tight financial moment (think I had just
bought the house, and the old one blew up and needed immediate
replacement. I bought a cheap "upgrade" box, you know just the box
with a motherboard, ram - no hard drive. Wacked the old hard drives
in and DVB-S cards in and away I went. Hence it is a Sempron 1GHz with
1G RAM. IDEx1, sata x2. Single core, not even hyperthreaded. I don't
comm flag, It even takes a while to index my music files under
squeezeboxserver. Lots of room for hard drives in the case though.)
> My entire motherboard, CPU and 8 Gibytes of RAM was only about $550,
> so I think it was a very cost effective upgrade from my old
> motherboard's 4 SATA ports. The new CPU and extra RAM means that
> commercial skip processing happens in real time on up to four
> recordings at once, which really cuts down on the disk accesses as the
> data is all still in RAM cache. So I would recommend seriously
> considering a motherboard upgrade as the best option.
>
Yeah see above. What did you get? And from where? $550 is an OK
budget. The whole family now is thoroughly familiar with both myth and
xbmc, so it's a investment for the whole family (isn't it???).
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