Topic: How do you mount harddrives after installation?

[Ty Tong]

Basically, here's my setup:

Abit SA6R motherboard w/built in raid

I have a 6GB connected to the primary ide controller, and a pair 45GB(mirrored) on the raid controller.  I installed e-smith on the small drive since it won't recognize the on-board controller.  When I went to the redhat site it shows support for the chipset and this is basically what it states,

"This chipset is commonly found as the UltraDMA/100 controller on many PCI IDE adapters, as well as on some motherboards. If this is the only enabled IDE controller in the system, you should have no problems (although, you will only get 33MB/s speeds), but if it's the second of two (or more) then you will have to pass the kernel a parameter at the LILO boot: prompt, as documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ide.txt."

What I want to to be able to mount the larger drives on and use them as for the i-bays, but being completely new to linux, I have no clue what the above means.  Can someone help me out?  Thanks.

Ty

[Darrell May]

This type of customization question is better suited for the experienced user forum.

However, I do not believe the Abit on-board raid functionality will work.  To make things easier for you, you may be better off using the two 45GB drives connected to the primary IDE controller and install e-smith using software RAID-1 and enable the hard drive optimization setting during install, via the control console panel.

Anything further would require major customization, not suitable for someone 'being completely new to linux'  

Regards,

Darrell

[Charlie Brady]

Darrell May wrote:

> To make things easier for you, you
> may be better off using the two 45GB drives connected to the
> primary IDE controller and install e-smith using software
> RAID-1 and enable the hard drive optimization setting during
> install, via the control console panel.

You'd be even better off to set up the two 45GB drives to be master drives on the primary and secondary IDE controllers. You don't get the best out of your drives if they are on the same cable.

Regards

Charlie

[Ty Tong]

Charlie Brady wrote:
>
> Darrell May wrote:
>
> > To make things easier for you, you
> > may be better off using the two 45GB drives connected to the
> > primary IDE controller and install e-smith using software
> > RAID-1 and enable the hard drive optimization setting during
> > install, via the control console panel.
>
> You'd be even better off to set up the two 45GB drives to be
> master drives on the primary and secondary IDE controllers.
> You don't get the best out of your drives if they are on the
> same cable.
>
> Regards
>
> Charlie

The problem that I see with setting up the two 45gigs as masters on primary and secondary is that where would my cdrom go?  I've read that it isn't very good to slave a cdrom with a harddrive

[Darrell May]

Ty Tong wrote:
> The problem that I see with setting up the two 45gigs as
> masters on primary and secondary is that where would my cdrom
> go?  I've read that it isn't very good to slave a cdrom with
> a harddrive

Charlie is correct, if you only have hard drives, it is best to use the two independent controllers.  However, it is best to place slower devices, such as an ide CD-ROM or ide tape drive on their own controller so in your situation place your fast hard drives on the primary controller master/slave and CD-ROM on secondary.

Darrell

[Charlie Brady]

Darrell May wrote:
 
> Ty Tong wrote:
> > The problem that I see with setting up the two 45gigs as
> > masters on primary and secondary is that where would my cdrom
> > go?  I've read that it isn't very good to slave a cdrom with
> > a harddrive
>
> Charlie is correct, if you only have hard drives, it is best
> to use the two independent controllers.  However, it is best
> to place slower devices, such as an ide CD-ROM or ide tape
> drive on their own controller so in your situation place your
> fast hard drives on the primary controller master/slave and
> CD-ROM on secondary.

I can see the logic in your recommendation Darrell, but I don't think that it is applicable. In normal usage, the CDROM is only used for installation, and the tape backup is only used in the middle of the night. The fact that access to these slower devices will slow disk access is not important. OTOH, you will only get maximum speed from the two disk drives if they are each master on their own cable. For maximum disk performance in normal usage, put the disks as master and tape and cdrom drives as slave.

If you really care about performance, use SCSI, which doesn't suffer from this silliness.

Charlie

[Boris]

I've seen IDE devices (Tape,CDROM,ZIP) affecting HD speed on the same chanel even its not been used, just by being connected where as slave.
However Ty Tong has enough controlers to seperate all his devices as the ASUS MB Hi's using has total of four chanels (two builtin and two additional Promise RAID)