Getting Started Configuring a hard disk

The STi5528 and STM8000 devices have on-chip support for Ultra DMA IDE disks. Of the six U-DMA transfer speeds (from U-DMA0, the slowest up to U-DMA5), currently only U-DMA4 is supported.

It has been certified on disks manufactured by:

• Maxtor
• SeaGate
• Western Digital

Linux kernel for Espresso, STi5528 Evaluation (Mb376), ST220 Evaluation (Mb392) and STm8000 Demo (Mb379), have the IDE support is configured by default.
However, configuring the ST IDE Interface concerns the following steps:

1. select "ATA/IDE support" on main menu and make it active.
2. open the IDE, ATA and ATAPI block devices list and make active the Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support" too.

Finally, when booting the kernel, add the following parameter in the command line to inform the driver to enable data transfer in Ultra DMA:

... ide0=dma ...

PIO mode will be used otherwise.

Booting a Linux kernel, configured with IDE support, on a board without any disk plugged, it may result in a long boot time, due to the attempt of SW driver to probe for not exsiting devices.
To overcome this undesirable effect without re-configuring the kernel change the ide0 argument:

... ide0=noprobe ...

Note: actions such as enabling ad disabling the Ultra DMA mode and putting the Disk drive in standby mode (lowers the noise) can be done also on a running system by using the hdparm utility.