15. Hard drives
All hard drives should work if the controller is supported.
Users of large Western Digital IDE hard drives (40GB up to 200GB
at least) manufactured before 2003-03-25 should look at
this FAQ
for an update that fixes a serious bug in those drives.
(From the SCSI HOWTO) All direct access SCSI devices with a
block size of 256, 512, or 1024 bytes should work. Other block
sizes will not work (Note that this can often be fixed by changing
the block and/or sector sizes using the MODE SELECT SCSI
command).
Large IDE (EIDE) drives work fine with newer kernels. The
boot partition must lie in the first 1024 cylinders due to PC BIOS
limitations.
Some Conner CFP1060S drives may have problems with Linux and
ext2fs. The symptoms are inode errors during
e2fsck
and corrupt file systems. Conner has released a firmware upgrade
to fix this problem, contact Conner at 1-800-4CONNER (US) or
+44-1294-315333 (Europe). Have the microcode version (found on
the drive label, 9WA1.6x) handy when you call.
Many Maxtor and Western Digital IDE drives are reported to
not happily co-exist on the same IDE cable with the other
manufacturers drive. Usually one of the drives will fail during
operation. Solution is to put them on different IDE cables.
Certain Micropolis drives have problems with Adaptec and
BusLogic cards, contact the drive manufacturers for firmware
upgrades if you suspect problems.
15.1. Unsupported
The following hard drives are mentioned as not supported
by Linux. Read the bug report available.
NEC D3817, D3825, D3827, D3847 "These drives are
slightly non-SCSI-2 compliant in the values reported in
Mode Sense Page 3. In Mode Sense Page 3 all NEC D38x7
drives report their sector size as zero. The NEC drives
are the first brand of drive we have ever encountered that
reported the sector size as zero. Unfortunately, that
field in Mode Sense Page 3 is not modifiable and there is
no way to update the firmware on the D38x7 drives to
correct this problem." Problems are mentioned for D3825
and D3827 (both revision 0407). Revision 0410 of these two
hard drives seems to solve this problem.
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