[ale] My Next Computer

[Greg Freemyer]

Hey Pete,

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:30:16 -0500, Pete Hardie <pete.hardie at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:50:26 -0500, Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:
> > Pete Hardie wrote:
> > > On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 07:47:13 -0500, Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>I don't know that you would want to go that route for your drives as well.
> > >
> > > Well, that's also partly driven by my wish to have easy-to-move drives
> > > for my system and the wife's.
> > >
> > > As an aside, if I want a disk drive for general storage of MP3s and
> > > pictures, accessible from linux and M$, what's a good filesystem to
> > > use?  NTFS?  FAT?  Or are there ext{2|3} format readers for Windows?
> >
> > What happened to world domination???
> 
> <shhhh>
> 
> 
> >
> > I have an external usb/firewire drive that is 160g, I've seen the same
> > model in a 250g.  You'll likely end up going with fat if you want
> > writeability from both Linux and windows.
> 
> Ok, I can deal with that as a storage format, esp since all the flash
> drives inthe house end up FAT32 anyway.
> 

 Warning to all, FAT32 in the 2.4 kernels from SUSE 8.1 were buggy if
you went past 137 GB.  (I don't know if that is a device, or partition
issue.  I tested a 250GB disk with a single 250GB partition.  Worked
fine until I put too much data on it.)

The 2.6 kernel from SUSE 9.2 seems to work fine in my testing.

> >
> > >>>So is this just a pipedream, or is an all-USB system possible ?
> > >>
> > >>I think the most difficult problem you'll have is getting it to boot off
> > >>of a usb device.
> > >
> > >
> > > Good point.  I thought I had seen something inidcating that "modern"
> > > BIOSes could do this - in reference to a USB flash drive boot tool.
> >
> > I've wanted to test this in the past as I've seen usb drives show up
> > during Linux installs, but haven't had the time to play with it.
> 
> I've got a buddy that just built his own new machine - I'll ping him
> and see if he can get a USB drive to boot.

I have one machine with a new Intel P4 MB.  It has a boot from USB
entry in the bios.  If I have it enabled, the boot process stops if I
have a thumb-drive in the USB port.  (i.e. The thumb-drive appears to
be the preferred boot media.)

I have not tried putting a MBR, etc. on the thumb drive, but I assume
it would work.

A bigger issue is that USB 2.0 is slow compared with ATA, and SATA
will be even faster, so why tie yourself to such a slow technology:

    usb 2.0 = 480 mbit/sec = 50 MB/sec = slow
    ATA/100 = 100 MB/sec = okay, and very common
    ATA/133 = 133 MB/sec = good, but the end of the PATA line
    SATA/150 = 150 MB/sec = Today's starting point for SATA performance.
    SATA/600 = 600 MB/sec = the potential future of SATA drives

Admittedly, all of the above are theoretical burst speeds, but
real-world speeds are a function of the above.

I've also heard a rumor that 128+ GB PATA drives are being
discontinued in favor of SATA drives.  (Any confirmations out there??)

Admittedly, we still use PATA drives as our standard drive, but if I
was setting up new disk drive configs (even for my house), I would be
looking at SATA.

What we do for all of our "movable" PATA drives is use a disk carrier.
 The ICY-Dock carriers are about $50 each.  With them I can quickly
move disks around and I still get the native PATA speed.  Since
hot-swap is not supported on most ATA controllers, we do power down
the PCs during disk moves.

SATA cables can be upto 1 meter long, but I don't know if you can get
external SATA boxes similar to the USB-2 external boxes?

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer