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srs5694
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Joined: 08 Mar 2004
Posts: 434
Location: Woonsocket, RI

PostPosted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:15 pm    Post subject: SATA & PATA on K8T800-based board Reply with quote

I've just ordered an MSI K8T NEO-FSR motherboard, which uses the VIA K8T800/VT8237 chipset, and I've got some questions about parallel and serial ATA support. I've ordered a new 80GB SATA drive to use with the board, but I also intend to use an old 60GB PATA drive and a PATA CD-ROM drive. Thus, I'll need both PATA and SATA support, both of which are provided by the VT8237 Southbridge on this board. As I understand it, PATA support is provided by a driver in the ATA section of the kernel, and SATA support is provided by a new libata driver in the SCSI section of the kernel. So far so good; however, Rick Moen's SATA information page mentions disabling all PATA support to use libata drivers, says that the VT8237 SATA driver is beta, and mentions that the VT8237 PATA driver can control SATA devices. So:


  • Do I really need to disable the PATA drivers to use the SATA drivers? If so, do the SATA drivers handle the legacy PATA hardware?
  • How reliable are the beta-level SATA drivers?
  • Are there speed or CPU load benefits to doing it one way or the other?
  • Do people have any general recommendations for how to proceed?


Thanks for any advice on this matter.
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mike4148
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Joined: 09 Sep 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 12:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I had to enable both to get both to work on my MSI K8T-Master2 FAR (K8T800/VT8237 as well). The VIA PATA driver (VT82C686) would not detect my SATA drive, contrary to what many have said around here. Some have even said that enabling both leads to terrible, terrible crashes, but my system works 100% perfectly - I have a 60GB PATA disk, a PATA DVD-ROM, and a 74GB SATA disk. All work well - I even did some basic stress-testing of the whole setup after enabling both drivers to make sure nothing died. I'm currently running gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.3-r1.

Answers to your questions, from my perspective:
1. I think I just answered this, for the most part. I can guarantee you that the libata driver does not support PATA hardware (except perhaps with some kind of hardware cable adapter; in which case, it would cease being 'P' ATA anyway).

2. Apparently, they work very well. I've been running 100% stably with them for a few weeks now. The system has even had a couple of hardlocks while I was messing with the nvidia drivers without any filesystem corruption.

3. I have no idea.

4. Start by disabling any SATA Legacy Mode support in your BIOS (mine doesn't even have the option). It will definitely confuse things. Then, try just the PATA driver, to keep things simple. If it picks up your drive, do some further research (and probably some benchmarking). If it doesn't, try both - I can certify that it works on my MSI board.
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