share the knowledge on SATA & blacklisted hardware

Forum: Hardware Talk
Topic: share the knowledge on SATA & blacklisted hardware
started by: aveline

Posted by aveline on Aug. 12 2005,22:00

I'm going to cut n paste a bit of stuff from another forum I'm on (ubuntu forum) where a fellow posted a question about getting a linux compatible SATA controller card & hard drives. He said:

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My drive (Seagate 200GB SATA) was a blacklisted drive in the kernel(along with the silicon Image 3112 controller), but performance was four times slower cause of the blacklist..<snip>Unfortunately,after 3 months, I now have a drive with a couple of bad blocks..shit..dont know if its cause of the hack or cause of the heat

Now here he says it might be a heat problem but then later in the thread another fellow posted asking what blacklisted means & got:

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this is from the kernel's sata_sil.c (for any Silicon Image controller)..the support for sil is bad enough, but Nvidia controller support is worse(no RAID AFAIK)... [list of blacklisted hdds follows, of which i'll post only mine for now, but if someone wants the whole list i can post it]... "ST3200822AS", SIL_QUIRK_MOD15WRITE }

He goes on to say this bit which kind of baffled me a bit:

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aveline - The blacklist means that the kernel is not letting you run your SATA drive at full speed for whatever reason. when the blacklist was on, I would get speeds of only 19MB/s, but when i commented out the blacklist in the kernel i got speeds of 56 MB/s from the hard disk. Unfortunately, doing that fried my disk. Just use that drive as a Ubuntu storage drive.(note: this also depends on what controller you have. google for it.)

Long story short, at this point I asked if it would be a bad idea to use it as a hdd for linux & he said yes b/c it will likely corrupt my data (due to the model of the drive) & suggested I google for my chipset too b/c that will have some effect on things. He wasn't clear what effect the chipset has and has not replied as yet to my last post. I know this is long, please forgive me, but I wanted some other peoples opinions on this issue from this forum b/c i respect alot of yuo guys' opinions on stuff & haven't steered me wrong yet.

Thanks in advance
aveline