Thanks, John. Better late than never.

So it seems SATA is supported in 2.4 now only for some controllers and drives, but will be better supported in 2.4.27. It's still bleeding edge enough that I wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't willing to fiddle a bit (or a lot) with it. We're hoping for something that will install and run "out of the box", so to speak. Good to know that progress is being made, though.

According to John Lange:

This is certainly a late reply but I stumbled on this discussion about Serial ATA today:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/2926

John

On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 21:10, Gilles Detillieux wrote:

...

Hi, folks. One of our colleagues wants to put together a fairly sup'ed up PC to run our Linux based data capture and analysis software. He is planning on getting a Dell Optiplex GX270 Small MiniTower system (he's very keen on getting it from Dell), with a 120 GB SATA hard drive.

Does anyone on this list have any experience with using SATA hard drives under Linux? I'd like him to use Fedora Core 1, as Red Hat's flavour of Linux is what I'm used to supporting (and our software is RPM packaged for Red Hat). I also think he might need to stick to the 2.4 kernel, as the driver for the A/D card we use hasn't (to my knowledge) ever been tested on anything but 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, so I'm a bit dubious about it working well with 2.6 for at least the next while. What I've read so far about SATA support on Linux, which isn't much, led me to believe not many SATA controllers are supported yet, and that SATA support seems to be in the 2.6 kernel. Has anyone tried SATA drives and do they work with 2.4?

I've recommended he stick to standard ATA unless I hear of some success stories with SATA.

A somewhat unrelated question: he was going to get this PC with an nVidia GeForce 4MX (with DVI & VGA outputs). I've never used this card (or any nVidia card for that matter - we tend to stick with ATI most of the time), so I was wondering if anyone knows if it plays well with FC1. I did a bit of quick googling this afternoon, but got somewhat mixed stories with some folks complaining of nVidia's drivers breaking after a kernel update, while some posts suggested no special drivers were needed for FC1. I'm not quite sure they were all talking about the same card though. Any words of wisdom?

Thanks, Gilles