Just got a brand new Asrock K8NF4G-SATA2, based on Nvidia C51G integrated Graphic chipset, at unbeatable price HK$500.

The motherboard comes with 1 x 16xPCIE, 1 x 1xPCIE, 2 x PCI slot, 2 x SATA-II and 100Mbps ethernet. The selling point of the board is the DX9.0 integrated graphic, but I don't care about it as long as it can show me some text and save me a seperated VGA card. I want to use it to build a cheap linux backup server, so as long as it's IDE/SATA and 100Mbps ethernet works for me, I'll be happy.

I booted the new machine with fedora core 4 boot disk, the first thing I noticed is that fedora core 4 just cannot find any of my Hitachi T7K250 SATA harddisks. Nevermind, at least it found my Hitachi T7K250 IDE so I wish I can at least install linux into the machine first then fight with the SATA part. However, when the installation process format my IDE harddisk, I found that the format go abnormally sloooow. It takes almost half an hour to format about 10% of 250GB disk space. I lost my patience, reboot the machine and boot into linux rescue mode to check what's wrong.

I checked the boot log and found that FC4 just doesn't initalize the IDE interface properly. It just use the slowest PIO mode. I tried to turn on DMA with hdparm with no success. hdparm -t /dev/hda gives me 2.69MB/s! So if I willing to wait around 4-5 hours, I may be able to install linux with it ..... Maybe the chipset is too new for linux and I should pick a motherboard with not so new chipset.

update:

Finally get linux installed. After update the kernel to 2.6.13, everything run great. hdparm now give 58MB/s, and the SATA drives got recongized as well.