SATA hot swap

[Jarod Wilson]

On 06/17/2009 07:03 PM, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On 06/09/2009 08:50 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> sync, unmount, power off, yank connector.
>
> unmount, sync?

Huh?

>> I've never had to
>> bother with rescanning the bus on insert either.
>
> For some reason I often see the drives in dmesg but have to 'partprobe'
> to get everything squared up.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever hot-plugged an esata 
drive into a machine that didn't have X up and running, so perhaps 
udev/hal/whatever is doing some magic for me behind the scenes. Headless 
boxes, I've only used FireWire and USB external drives.

>> Of course, some SATA chipsets (and/or drivers) behave better than
>> others, but Intel's ICH stuff tends to be pretty solid in my experience.
>> YMMV with other chipsets.
>
> Yeah, ICH for disk is very good.  I'm currently fighting an ICH10 for
> SATA DVD, though, but that might not be its fault (BIOS, linux, dunno).

Also a relatively new variant of ICH. But I've seen more than a few BIOS 
that didn't handle sata optical drives particularly well. The Plextor 
DVD burner hooked to my ICH7 sata here works great though.

> I've been happy with sil SATA too when the drivers are mature.  Sun used
> Marvell Hercules-2 in their 45-way Thumper athlon storage box, which
> Supermicro sells in an PCIX flavor.

I've had mixed results with Silicon Image controllers. Mostly sane, but 
not always. JMicron? Run the other way. Marvell... Works reasonably 
well, but there's one variant that requires a module option to disable 
scanning for ata drives on it, because they recycled a device ID or 
something. The pure sata Marvell controller in my workstation here at 
home requires 'ahci.marvell_enable=1' to get the ahci driver to bind to 
it, or pata_marvell takes over and makes everything non-functional 
(iirc). I've also got a ServerWorks sata controller in one box that is a 
bit annoying, in that the dmraid driver doesn't support much of any of 
the fakeraid options it provides. Not sure if that's dmraid's fault or 
sata_svw's fault.

> I've learned to run away screaming
> like a little girl from 3Ware SATA of late.

Really? I'm still quite partial to my 3ware stuff, but its a bit dated 
now -- my workstation in the office has a 12-port 9550SX (PCI-X) card in 
it that works fantastically.

> I've been writing a little raid helper script that will do all of this
> for you given a mount point.  It's got to be done by the end of this
> month...

Ooh, fun!...

--jarod