> > That IBM hard disk in septictank is an ATA/100 disk I believe. The > Gigabyte motherboard supports ATA/66, but I'm not sure if the Linux > kernel supports it.
Use hdparm to check whatever you got dma enabled for your disks. From the low performance I guess it's not... And to comment some other responses: Scsi DO have some benefits over ide, but for a normal user/workstation it's certainly not worth the extra cost in my opinion. For life supporting systems, maybe... To hook up 7 ide devices, just buy 3ware's ATA raid card with 8 channels. The total cost including disk will be a lot lower than for scsi. And when you need a few tens of TB you want a standalone raid system anyway... When it comes to quality, I doubt there's any real differens these days. And even if there is; disks will eventually fail, that why you use raid-X (X!=0). As for performance, the "normal" pci bus itself will limit you to 133MB/s or similar... Best regards, Emil