An Acronym for Serial ATA. Compare PATA.

A cheaper alternative to SCSI for connecting BlockDevices. The performance of SATA-1 compliant hard drives is equivalent with 10,000 RPM SCSI drives (Ultra160/Ultra320) (provided of course that the SATA drive is 10,000 RPM and has similar cache).

SATA drives are like SCSI drives in that they do not just work for boot devices if you are building your own LinuxKernel or with some LinuxDistributions.

The reason for this is that they need a driver and the driver is on the disk - catch 22.

The solution is one of two ways:

• For the relevant drivers build into the LinuxKernel rather than as a Module
• Use initrd(4) - see InitialRamDisk for more information

Serial ATA Hard-Drives/Controllers Usable in Linux

Silicon Images SiL3112A PCI Two-Port Serial ATA Controller

See 3112 for notes on this.

Silicon Image Si3114

I got this working using the Debian Installer Beta 4 netinst ISO. At one point it required me to "Execute a shell" and modprobe the sata_sil module manually, but apart from that it was reasonably painless. Kernel 2.6's SATA support was easy to get working using the netinst ISO - I wasn't successful in my attempts at getting it working with 2.4 though.

CategoryHardware