type of hard disk drive interface [solved]

[ckonn]

hi
my pc is HP Pavilion Notebook - 15-p152nu
under linux mint 17.3 rosa
recently i was interested to know what type of hard disk drive interface i have on my laptop.

according to this website - https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP ... /c04479939

my pc should have a 'Hard Drive 1 TB 5400 rpm SATA'

but the output from 'lshw -c disk' shows a little bit different result ...

...
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: ST1000LM024 HN-M
vendor: Seagate
...

what should that mean? what type of hard disk drive interface i have on my pc actually - ATA/PATA, SATA,
SAS or something else?

thanks in advance

[Laurent85]

Must be a sata drive. See smartctl command output to confirm:

Code: Select all

apt install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -i -q noserial /dev/sda

[ckonn]

the output from 'sudo smartctl -i -q noserial /dev/sda'

Code: Select all

smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.19.0-32-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Momentus SpinPoint M8 (AF)
Device Model:     ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB
Firmware Version: 2BA30001
User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Nov 14 13:05:53 2017 EET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

hm, ATA and SATA simultaneously!?

[Laurent85]

That means it's a sata drive, more precisely a 2.5" sata drive. See seagate pdf https://www.seagate.com/files/staticfil ... 98122c.pdf for more details. It seams your drive is SATA III capable, not SATA II as per pdf doc.

SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)

[ckonn]

ok, thanks!

[rene]

hm, ATA and SATA simultaneously!?

Those always exist simultaneously; ATA is the underlying protocol for both PATA, Parallel ATA, and SATA, Serial ATA. PATA used to frequently be referred to as IDE and, yes, simply as ATA but technically that's always been wrong. Back when no SATA existed and PATA was (in context) the only relevant ATA transport, it didn't matter much; these days it as evidenced by your question does.

[michael louwe]

@ ckonn, .......

SATA/AHCI hard-drives are backwards-compatible with the IDE/PATA/ATA interface of the computer. So, your 1TB hard-drive supports both the slower ATA/IDE and faster SATA interface.

Computers have a BIOS setting to select the interface for the internal hard-drive, eg IDE/ATA/Legacy or SATA/AHCI or RAID. To install Win XP SP1, you need to select IDE in BIOS setup because the OS did not have SATA/AHCI drivers. To connect a SATA SSD to the computer, you need to select SATA/AHCI in order to get the TRIM function.

[rene]

Please note that Michael is now only talking about the software interface; clearly your SATA drive is not compatible with having a 40-pin ribbon cable plugged into it. This support for the old PATA software-interface is also not the ATA that your smartctl report was referring to; that one indeed refers to the underlying protocol only.

[michael louwe]

@ ckonn, .......

Most pre-2003 computers have only IDE/PATA connectors for IDE/PATA internal hard-drives that come in sizes of 80GB or less. You can connect a more modern SATA hard-drive to such old computers by buying a SATA-to-IDE adapter cable but the data transfer speed will be according to the slower IDE/PATA standard(= about 500Mbps), eg ...
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch& ... Zn6MdVumeQ

When my old 2004 laptop went kaput in 2013, I took out its IDE/PATA 80GB hard-drive, put it into an external USB 2.0 hard-drive enclosure/casing and installed LM 17 on it alongside Win 7 which was on the internal SATA 500GB hard-drive of a new laptop. The IDE/PATA 80GB hard-drive worked for another 3 years as an external USB hard-drive before finally dying. So, I replaced it with a used 160GB SATA hard-drive + a new USB 3.0 hard-drive enclosure, also running LM 17.3 = cost me about US$30 in total. Had to realign the SATA external USB hard-drive with GParted before LM 17.3 could be installed on it.

[rene]

PATA drives did exist up to 500G; recently sold one that used to do duty in a 1999 system in fact; it now hosts a 120G one. Anyways, we're just talking among ourselves now...

[michael louwe]

PATA drives did exist up to 500G; recently sold one that used to do duty in a 1999 system in fact; it now hosts a 120G one. Anyways, we're just talking among ourselves now...

.
My apologies.

I was mostly referring to the average pre-2003 laptops that usually came with IDE/PATA hard-drives of 120GB or below. Of course, high-end pre-2003 laptops, desktops and servers would have come with larger IDE/PATA hard-drives, eg 160GB/250GB/500GB.
... Once, I had a bulky 4GB IDE/PATA hard-drive for a desktop from the 1990s.!

[rene]

Yep. Still have one in operation, a Maxtor 4.3G drive that sits in a Pentium 233MMX machine. The 386 next to it has a 170MB Conner. When I bought that one it was explicitly very, very large...