[gentoo-user] Questions about SATA and hot plugging.

[Dale]

Hi,

I got one more hard drive to move over and it is SATA.  Question one, 
can the new mobo's do hot plugging for SATA drives?  I have a plug on 
the front of the case and was wondering since it is on the front if they 
can be hot swapped or if I need to shutdown then hook it up.  If I can 
hot swap, where does the power come from?  I know the drives I put in 
the case have a separate power connection.  How's that work exactly?  Is 
that just for external drives that have their own power?

I have two dries in here already.  One I bought and one that was 
donated.  This is what hdparm reports:

fireball ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
  Timing cached reads:   6788 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3395.32 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:  328 MB in  3.01 seconds = 109.06 MB/sec
fireball ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
  Timing cached reads:   6736 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3367.58 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads:  324 MB in  3.01 seconds = 107.69 MB/sec
fireball ~ #

Is that about normal?  The mobo is 3Gbs/sec and the drives are too.  
Shouldn't they be faster than that?  I read at one time that SATA is 
basically plug up and it works.  Just checking if there is a setting I 
need to change.

Related to the above, in the BIOS, it is set to Native IDE.  Should that 
be set to AHCI instead?  Is that why it is slower than expected?  Is 
that good to go with Linux as well?  I have this set in the kernel and 
built in as usual:

AHCI SATA support

Let me know if I am somewhat right on anything.  Oh, I decided to name 
the new rig fireball instead of lightening.  ;-)  You may notice that in 
the paste up above.

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)