Beowulf wrote:

> The SATA drives are 3 Gigabit/sec data transfer which will help
> greatly, 400MB each, 7200rpm. I am worried that linux will have issues
> recognizing SATA

Use lspci to check what chip-set your computer uses, this makes it easier to
guess which driver you need to use (can be that the driver is already loaded
automatically if you haven't disabled it in BIOS), to find out loaded modules,
use lsmod.

> anybody know how good/bad linux is with SATA?

The major chip-sets are supported, some strange unknwon companies could have
made their own chip-set which could be unsupported.


> Anything I
> could do in advance to help this go smoothly? I might even want to set up
> the two SATA drives as a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array, undecided on that matter
> (any thoughts on that also appreciated).

If you are after speed, then think of XFS as file system on RAID 0.


> Realtime playback of video during editing requires massive cpu, gcpu, and
> data throughput to drives, hence the setup. I also ordered a second nvidia
> GeForce 7900GT to add to my one to create a SLI setup for dual graphics
> cards to help with the rendering--I hope I can get linux to play nice with
> the SLI setup.

There are some issues here (or at least there was), check the README for the
nVidia driver you are using for information on issues with SLI and some hardware.


--

//Aho