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July 9, 2005
The smart serial disk killer
Most of my research work takes place on an AMD64 machine the company bought the last year. Even if not the top of its class, the 3200+ with Socket 754 is after all a 64 bit machine which is not only x86 compatible but very fast at running both 32 and 64 bits code. In short, it's a wonderful little strong machine which boots Windows XP Professional x64 Edition in less than 8 seconds, from the moment of the POST screen to the moment I can click on "my Computer".
To catch up with the increased space requirements due to my sql databases and lots of samples, I've got an additional 200GB HDD for it. A Seagate, 200GB Serial-ATA drive, which Linux (Fedora Core 4) detects as "/dev/sda". This disk is fast in reading and in theory, it should easily surclass the similar 200GB IDE drive in writing due to the Serial ATA Native Command Queuing.
Unfortunately, it looks like Serial ATA disks are not supported by smartmontools. Moreover, the Linux kernel doesn't say anything extra about the drive at boot-time, except the size and the fact the cache is set to "write-back". The message from smartctl blames "libata" for the poor job:
"Device: ATA ST3200826AS Version: 3.03
SATA disks accessed via libata are not currently supported by smartmontools. When libata is given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an additional '-d libata' device type will be added to smartmontools."
Oh well, I'll probably have to accept that I'm just not lucky when it comes to dealing with "SMART" devices. ;)
Posted by Costin Raiu at July 9, 2005 3:50 PM