# Need advice on SATA drive

## kevin

I'm running out of hard drive space and I'm thinking about getting a larger drive.  My ASUS A7V8X motherboard supposedly handles SATA and I thought about getting a SATA drive.  Searching the forums, I see mixed results on SATA with Linux.

Should I get a SATA drive?  Is it well supported yet or should I wait longer before getting it.  I don't want to be stuck worrying about drive problems and/or corruption.  I'm currently running Gentoo 1.4 with the 2.6.3 kernel.

Thanks,

Kevin

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## GuidoJ

II have a Maxtor 160 Gb SATA on a MSI Neo mobo (AMD64, VIA chipset) running gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.5. No problems so far. 

BTW I tried installing WinXP64Beta on it, but that piece of crap doesn't have proper SATA drivers and will not detect any HDs. And the mobo only came with 32bit drivers ...  :Rolling Eyes: 

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## srs5694

SATA support depends very much on the SATA controller. I don't know offhand what's in the ASUS A7V8X motherboard, but according to ASUS it's got a VIA chipset, so there's a good chance it uses the VT8237. If so, that should work fine, at least with 2.6.x kernels. (I'm not sure how mature the support is in the 2.4.x kernels.) If the SATA controller is something else, though, you'll need to research it. Try this site for more information.

As a side note for Kevin, you can get beta VIA VT8237 SATA drivers for the 64-bit versions of Windows from the VIA Web site. This isn't important for Linux, of course; the drivers ship with recent kernels.

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## danone

my Advice for you Samsung Spinpoint the are fast,cool,quiet and reliable and the fastest SATA  except the Raptor i have used

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## PaV

ive just finished installing sata on a7n8x, gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.5-r1 and after some minor problems it works flawlessly. the problems were to find proper drivers in kernel and remember that after going out of livecd the drives changed from hdeX to sdaX. that means, you can safely buy it  :Smile: 

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## spinfire

I have a Maxtor 6Y200M0 on a Silicon Image controller onboard my Abit NF7-S.  I am using the 2.6 libata drivers, and they've worked excellently.  After adding the drive I tested it rsyncing 200GB of data to it until the disk was full.  The drivers held up fine.

It is now the third drive of a 400GB LVM, and everything continues to work like a champ.

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## GuidoJ

 *srs5694 wrote:*   

> As a side note for Kevin, you can get beta VIA VT8237 SATA drivers for the 64-bit versions of Windows from the VIA Web site. This isn't important for Linux, of course; the drivers ship with recent kernels.

 

Yes, found that one too. It turns out that Windows needs a primary partition for ntldr, which I don't have. Oh well, who needs Windows anyway   :Wink: 

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