IDE Hard Disks

[stagdriver]

Hi, I have looked through the threads and i am surprised this has not apparently been asked yet.

I a setting up a basic NAS system using spare hardware before buying in Sata hard drives. I have used an intel D945gnt mainboard with d960 processor. 4gig ram and 4 attached 320gb ide (pata, not sata) hard disks.
I am booting from a 16gb usb stick and all looks good except i cannot see my hard drives through the web interface.

am i being silly here, does free Nas support ide hard disks? or is it specifically for sata drives?

Help appreciated. regards

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS uses whatever disks are connected that use controllers that are compatible with the FreeNAS driver set from FreeBSD. If they don't work I'd say you don't have master/slave set up properly, the BIOS settings aren't setup properly(perhaps AHCI) or the controller isn't supported.

 

[originalprime]

I saw this:

IDE Hard Drives

...and immediately thought:

That guy is old school.

 

[cyberjock]

LOL. You weren't around for the MFM/RLL days were you?

 

[jgreco]

MFM/RLL

Oh you kids with these newfangled technologies. Give me SMD or maybe ESDI. ST-506 kind of sucked.

 

[originalprime]

You weren't around for the MFM/RLL days were you?

I might have something stuck in my eye. Was I around for what? I've never heard of it. :)

 

[gpsguy]

Then you surely won't remember using the debug command (in DOS) with "g=c800:5".

Was I around for what? I've never heard of it. :)

 

[cyberjock]

I might have something stuck in my eye. Was I around for what? I've never heard of it. :)

RLL (Run Length Limited) and MFM(modified frequency modulation) were forerunners to SCSI and IDE.

 

[jgreco]

RLL (Run Length Limited) and MFM(modified frequency modulation) were forerunners to SCSI and IDE.

Ugh, I wouldn't put it quite that way.

MFM and RLL were essentially encoding technologies for the data on disk. Drives were made in two variants, such as the 40MB ST-251 and the 60MB ST-277R, which I believe were virtually the same mechanism but they squeezed more sectors per track in with RLL. The controller and the disk were two entirely separate things. The interesting thing is that the drives were essentially dumb rotational storage devices that were managed by the controller. There were ways to take an MFM drive and stick it on an RLL controller and reformat it, and it'd gain 50% capacity. Back when 386BSD was just coming into being, it was pretty much the way you did PC hard drives.

IDE was a modification of this technique that involved taking that controller and integrating it onto the hard drive. In doing so, they made it possible to use different controller technologies and different encoding technologies because that was all handled on the drive; it also meant no more free 50% upgrades because you used an RLL controller with an MFM disk. Because they chose to use a stripped down variant of the ISA bus as the IDE interface, it became trivial to hook up several drives to a PC, but pretty much impossible to leverage cheap PC disks on other architectures. So IDE was pretty much strictly a cheap-arse commodity interface for PC's. One could reasonably say that ST-412/506 drives evolved into IDE drives.

ESDI was developed as a faster, more capable version of the ST-412/506 interface. Often used in servers and high end workstations, it was an early speed demon while bugs in the SCSI protocol and the shared bus scheme were worked out (heterogeneous SCSI busses were sometimes a nightmare prior to maybe 1995). For awhile, it was common to see SCSI-to-ESDI translators between a host SCSI port and fast ESDI disks, but ultimately this went the same way that IDE did: manufacturers recognized SCSI was a winner and high end drives went to SCSI.

Once the controller to physical drive attachment interfaces were rendered irrelevant, both IDE and SCSI drives rapidly evolved in both speed and capacity, since there was no need to worry about drives being compatible with hard drive controllers; they were designed together.

With a higher performance pedigree, SCSI remained relatively expensive compared to IDE, which hurt general purpose computing on non-x86 platforms, because storage remained frickin' expensive. So it is reasonable to say that SCSI evolved from a tier of drives above the old MFM/RLL drives.

I think everyone is kind of familiar with the evolution from there, so I'll stop at this point.

 

[Stephens]

He's BACK! ;)

I actually have quite a few IDE drives in the 1.5TB-2TB range that I occasionally think of throwing into a NAS box, then I realize I don't have a multiport PATA/IDE card to hook them up to. I'm sure something's out there, but the truth is when I started looking at building a 2nd NAS (to back up the first) with those drives, if I attached any value to my time, the value saved by reusing the drives quickly was surpassed by the time I'd invest in finding reliable controllers, purchasing, making sure there's support, etc. So I ended up just building using new SATA NAS boxes. I still have the IDE drives, though. If one day I come across a post from someone with a nice 6-drive PATA/IDE setup, I may give it a shot.

Oh, and I don't miss the SCSI bus at all. Terminators (Active/Passive), various connectors, ugh. Nightmares. Thank God for USB.

 

[jgreco]

There are PATA to SATA converter boards. Run in fear.

I have a 3Ware 7800 around here somewhere but my guess is it might not support the larger PATA hard drives.

I do miss the SCSI bus a bit, it was nice to be able to build custom cables for specific applications in-house. It is not bad to do custom SATA power cables, but data are really annoying. Haven't found a good way to build custom data other than to rip apart cables in the manner the case modders do. Last time I looked at SFF8087, that was also a nuisance. I kind of miss the days of being able to have the electronics shop build any conceivable ribbon cable necessary, or lots of others. We still do custom harnesses for front panels and fans and other stuff like that.

And hopefully you meant SATA, not USB.

 

[Stephens]

I meant USB. Aside from internal storage devices, I had a Jaz drive (whopping 2GB backup!), DAT (-DC, -DDS2, etc.) tape backup, HP scanner, etc. In other words, a bunch of different types of devices, not just on-line storage. And they ALL seemed to have different SCSI requirements of some sort of another (cable connector type, termination, etc.). My AHA-1542B was also somewhat flaky (or maybe it was the devices connected to it?), and required dip switches and custom jumpers. Oh, and let's not forget to make sure we don't exceed the maximum recommended cable length of the total bus. Oh, and if you have external and internal devices, keep your termination logic straight (except in some cases, logic failed and I simply had to play with it to get it to work). I had better things to do than play with that stuff. :-( So yeah, being able to buy a scanner, plug in a USB cable, and be off to the races is a welcome respite for me. I honestly haven't wished for SCSI in quite some time.

I've scanned NewEgg occasionally for some of the PATA/SATA converter boards and the feedback didn't leave me feeling confident. I've considered going on eBay and looking for a good PATA/IDE motherboard, but that's also time consuming. And it locks you into old technology all around (RAM, etc.) not just PATA/IDE. If only these companies would put out a $100 board that's rock solid instead of the $20 ones that are flaky. But we all know that even if given the choice, everyone (consumers) would buy the $20 one and they maanufactuerer would have wasted their money even making the $100 option available. Like I said, I basically use my IDE drives as archive drives for mostly static data at this point. It hasn't been worth the hassle to try to repurpose them by dragging the old technology into the present (and future). After all, what if I get a card, it goes belly up, and they don't make them anymore? Ugh.

So O.P.... we're not hijacking your thread. Just some things to consider.