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Henry Bremridge wrote:
Running ubuntu, she has an Hitachi IDE ATA hard-drive (160GB) and needs
some more space..
In googling:
- SATA disks seem to be larger for the same price than than ATA disks
- SATA disks require
- An appropriate motherboard
- Or an ATA PCI Card (£30 from Maplin, £16 from Dabs, £5 from Amazon)
- Or an SATA to ATA connector
Then I saw this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Port-Expansion-VIA-VT6421a-chipset/dp/B000S87GG0
4 Port SATA PCI Expansion Card &IDE VIA VT6421a chipset (3 Sata plus IDE) for £10
Which I figured I could plug into a spare slot, and add the new SATA drive
Question
1/ Has anyone used one of these things before, can anyone see any problems?
I'd have thought it would be okay. IIRC when I ran an SATA and IDE drive on my Ubuntu PC a while back, the SATA drives were assigned in priority of the IDE drive, so my two SATA drives were /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and the IDE drive was /dev/sdc2/ Any opinions on having SATA and IDE in one ubuntu machine?
I gather Ubuntu uses UUID's now so if you're just adding the drive for extra space you might find you're fine, but if you're using the new SATA drive as the main drive then you may need to play around with UUID or possibly re-write /etc/fstab to use /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc.
Personally I wouldn't touch a Samsung drive now after having two Samsung drives fail on me after a year, it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, but on the other hand I've also had Western Digital, Hitachi, Seagate and Maxtor drives fail on me within 3 years. I guess it's like anything, it can fail so always keep good backups.3/ Any opinions on which new hard drive (Samsung Spin Point F1 1TB Internal SATA Hard Drive for £56 was what I was thinking of, as opposed to ~ £45 for 500 MB ide)
Certainly though SATA seems to be the way to go. Another option would be to go for an SATA to IDE converter which allows you to plug an SATA drive into an IDE controller (or vice versa):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/SATA-Converter-Connect-Drive-Motherboard/dp/B001CYXMDAWhatever you go for though, you may need a power adaptor to convert from a molex connect to an SATA power connector although these are generally only a couple of quid.
Ta, Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html