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Append “NCQ” to “SATA” for “SATANCQ.”

It's a standard called mSATA, and the driver for the interface is Toshiba. The linked PDF is from 2009, so this is not new.

The only thing new here is that Toshiba and Apple decided to do away with the 2.5" form factor.

Yes.

Obviously, it does. ;)

Related: http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.asp

Well, from what I understood there are two modes - one which will give you only time slots so 5 drives each get 1/5th of the time. That's the cheap variety. The other variety is traffic based, you can't exceed 3 Gbps but you can get the cumulative read/write speed up to that point. The SATA spec site has more.

Data center folks... You know you can sell them 72GB SCSI drives all day. They have no clue about reliability, performance, capacity or redundancy. All they know is what they learned 10 years ago when they got their certs, and what their rep has told them since. They have no desire to read Google's published data.

SAS is the latest fad if they're not buying into iSCSI or whatever else they've been told is the latest trend in reliability and performance.

My vote for reliability, redundancy, bandwidth, volume and price? A low power Linux or BSD host on a platform with lots of bus bandwidth with lots of SATA Host controllers that support the attached SATA Port Multipliers. Then calculate. Five drives per Port Multiplier, 16 port multipliers per host controller (PCIE x8). Capacity is nothing less than immense even with the cheapest available drives (That's 800 SATA drives per x8 PCIe slot). RAID 6 with LED indicators. Net Drive bandwidth across this many drives can approach RAM bandwidth. Latency is not as good. Add processor cores to divide the data processed/network bandwidth to suit. With cheapest B/$ drives this is 400TB/slot. With highest capacity it's 800TB/slot or 3.2PB per server. For capacity on a retail solution this is about the max. YMMV. Rack mounts? Try sheet metal, a bender and a drill. Fans are <$1 in volume. You can put drives three deep and 20 wide in 3U with a PSU at the rear with room for cables. That's 800 drives per standard rack, with room for the server also. Failures? If a drive in an array fails, take an image of it and throw it away. The peers of a failed drive are probably doomed.

Of course if you need really high volume data storage you should send me a gmail with the specifics for a more tailored solution :-)

Naturally you're going to need a fatter network tube. At 10 Gbps it takes 44 minutes to backup 3.2PB.

I'm not sure what you mean:

- Sata Specifications

- USB

- Anyone can write a raid controller, we all understand the RAID levels and what they mean. What varies is how to program the chips to implement it (software interface).

- I will give you a little on the north bridge, the FSB is NOT standard and I think AMD's is different. But the rest of the north bridge contains well known PC bits: memory controllers, interrupt controllers, PCI(X|E) host bridges, power management, etc. etc. I could build one from scratch if I had a few million dollars laying around.

- The South Bridge could be implemented by anyone, it's got no secrets.

- As for Video, the AGP specification was well documented and freely available (I downloaded it when I was in college for free, I can't recally where). Going forward PCI-Express will be used, they simply use x8/x16 connectors. I think Apple uses the same.

Or did you mean software interfaces are not standardized? It's not as bad as you imply, but it is getting worse. Getting back on topic, Apple could take PC hardware as it stands and require vendors to support a common apple interface (they seem opposed to the device driver model, and I agree with them on that). But then us Linux types could just assume that interface and copy it, without paying the Apple tithe.

I find it more likely they will build a Mac using mostly commodity components (processors, etc.) to get their costs down and leverage that market, while changing the north bridge, which is what makes a PC a PC, and without which we can't really write much software. That combined with new microcode will make a totally incompatible, totally Apple system, just at a lower price. I for one hope they do, only because it may make PCs better.

SATA I currently has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 150MBytes/s. SATA II, which is hitting the market, has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 300 MBytes/s. And SATA III, which is about 3 years away, will have a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 600 MBytes/s.

So 1.5 GBytes/s it is not. You may have confused bits with bytes.

For more information look here.

These features include as backplane support with higher voltages (FR4 fiberglass insulation of circuit boards is more lossy at GHz bitrates than plastic used in the cables), port multipliers (connecting several drives), port selector (redundant communication channels), native command queuing and other features mostly targeted at the high end server market.

The 3 Gb/s (gigabits/sec) speed was actually part of the original 1.0a spec. The speeds 1.5 Gb/s, 3.0 Gb/s and 6.0 Gb/s are refered to as "Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3".

So it's natural to confuse "Gen 2" as mentioned in the 1.0a spec with the revision "II" spec which actually adds features and not increased speed.

I don't know much about SATA, so pardon the newbie question. But I've heard that SATA (Serial ATA) and/or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) will make computers easier to upgrade, at comparable or lower cost, and is more scalable than the current (Parallel) ATA in use.

My question, then: in a SATA-based system, where legacy (P)ATA has been phased out entirely, would you be able to do other things AND burn a CD at the same time with little / zero impact on performance? Also, is SATA meant to replace AGP, too?

Serial ATA II should be able to do what SCSI does now. See here

1. Disks aren't a uniform array of blocks, and even if you have disk geometry it's almost certainly at least simplified, and probably a total lie. (you can query a SCSI drive for the next "slowdown", but what that means is ill-defined, and not that useful anyways.)
2. Because of (1), you don't know when blocks are on the same track or not.
3. it may be more efficient head-movement-wise not to switch directions.
4. When reordering requests, head position matters, but so does rotational angle, and the OS scheduler has no idea about that.
5. Hardware raid. Now you really don't know what the geometry is or what the IO scheduling parameters are. Not to mention letting the raid controller make use of multiple drives efficiently for small requests.
6. This PDF shows that tagged queuing in SCSI drives is a win even with host IO ordering, when the IO stream is random or fairly real-world (lots of independant streams of reads and writes). There's minimal or no win for sequential IO.

Hm. Apple PowerMac G5:

* HyperTransport
* PCI-X / AGP
* DDR SDRAM
* S-ATA
* Gigabit Ethernet
* IEEE 1394b a.k.a. Firewire 800
* USB 2.0

So, tell me, which of these, which will be the only interfaces that you can sanely use, is proprietary?

In the PC world, anything other than an Opteron machine can compare in specs.

Um....there's SATA on the radar screens :). It is worth the cost of moving to a faster media. :)

I'll believe it when I see it on the peg at Wal*Mart.

Wonder which we'll see on the shelves first: this thing or Serial ATA? Which, by the way, has been on backorder for the last 6 months or so.

If anything deserves an award in the "Promises, promises" category (excepting Duke Nukem Whenever; that's earned several), it's Serial ATA.

Has anyone out there actually got their hands on a Serial ATA drive, PURCHASED from a retail source? I mean, several online shops LIST them, but nobody seems to actually HAVE them.

I take that back. In researching for this post, I actually DID find a place that lists them in stock. Let's hope they are telling the truth! Also, let's hope their order system can survive a slashdotting, since they seem to be the only place in the world that has them. I'm sure they'll be backordered by tomorrow.

If you want to know more about the Serial ATA technology:

Cnet

SATA and ISCSI

Intel Dev Paper

Maxtor White Paper

Serial ATA Working Group

This is a Serial ATA drive, which the article even mentions (second paragraph: "...Enterprise Serial advanced technology attachment..."), but then proceeds to call it an ATA drive (instead of SATA) for the rest of the article.

Here's a somewhat less misleading article.

> A few more and a correction.
> SATA 1.5 Gbps (not 1.2)

No - I was correct! Please actually read the specification yourself if you don't believe me! It's here - look in section 2.2 on page 12(13 in acrobat).

It's definitely 1.2Gbps which equates to 150MB/sec.

1.5Gbps would be 187.5MB/sec which is wrong.

Unless of course you think there are 10 bits in a byte which of course there aren't - there are 8. Always.

Nick...

If I remember things correctly this is to make it possible to run many different voltages (something like 3) to the drives, suitable for different sized drives.

The spec can be downloaded here (about 1 meg), if someone cares to verify my claims. It's all there.

Allows for multiple voltages and hot plugging. See serialata.org for details. It will be a while though. SATA is neither here nor now.

from what i can tell, These guys are addressing that very issue, considering that they're an adopter of it.

I didn't have a clue what serial ATA was (I'm not a hardware person), so I did a search and found The Serial ATA Working Group web site. That site has an interesting picture showing the difference in cables between parallel and serial cables here . The benefit (with the smaller cables), is that it is easier to maneuver the drives in PC cases. Other benefits of serial ATA are discussed at the web site.

I didn't have a clue what serial ATA was (I'm not a hardware person), so I did a search and found The Serial ATA Working Group web site. That site has an interesting picture showing the difference in cables between parallel and serial cables here . The benefit (with the smaller cables), is that it is easier to maneuver the drives in PC cases. Other benefits of serial ATA are discussed at the web site.

I've been following these and there's a number of manufacturers planning to make them available, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, et al, but dates have been pushed back. Seagate was to be shipping ST380023AS and ST3120023AS drives in late October, now I'm seeing late November or even December. Maxtor has stated they will ship in December, others I haven't found out about. There will be a SATA group presence at COMDEX. Here's a source of information, but it tends to be general and dated, aside from having some technical docs online, too.

Data transfer rate of SATA physical layer is 1.5Gb/s. See page 37 of the SATA spec.

IBM's name is on the front page of the SATA specification.

Well, I'm not the only one that calls it 1.5 Gb/s. The serial ATA website often refers to it as 1.5 Gb/s.

Also, signalling bits that are thrown away are often counted. Otherwise we would have 98 Mb/s ethernet instead of 100 :)

Click here for the full spec. SATA-II will likely usurp SCSI for all enterprise applications that don't require low random-access latencies (which is nearly nothing these days, comparatively speaking).

Note that Sun, IBM, AMD, nor HP are disk manufacturers. (Well, IBM might still be, my memory is being bad tonight, but I digress...) Some AMD and Intel motherboards are already coming with SATA RAID interfaces. Intel is right behind the technology, as they are a chipset manufacturer. AMD isn't. VIA, a chipset manufacturer is, along with a ton of other manufacturers who are core to desktop/workstation storage. Just because the big power houses that you name aren't on board doesn't mean anything. Most of these places leave their disk interfaces up to someone else. And those companies *are* adopters.

You might want to look at Serial ATA, then. And yes, Intel is one of the designers of the spec.

CPU performance will be a factor again within a couple of years. Software developers just have to get used to the headroom and realise the true implications of what they can do now. I'm working on some software right now (planning to release it under a BSD license now, but I have plans for a commercial release at some point in the future) which would heavily tax a modern CPU. And yes, it actually provides some *gasp* value. And no, it has nothing to do with video editing. :P

Be patient! We'll find something to do with your excess clock cycles soon enough.

From the TODO:

Would be nice to have before feature freeze, but most likely 2.7:
...
o Serial ATA support

From serialata.org:

Q13: When does Microsoft plan to support Serial ATA in its OS's?
A13: Serial ATA is software compatible with Parallel ATA and requires no changes to Microsoft operating systems, or any other OS as well.

If this is a drop in replacement for parallel ATA, why is support needed in the linux kernel?

Don't forget Serial ATA II http://www.serialata.org/news/S2why.pdf

from the serialata.org technical whitepaper, the protocol not only uses a serial method of data transmission (as opposed to the current parallel method), but the roadmap starts it at 150mb/s, then goes to 300mb/s and 600mb/s (!) as the technology advances. I'm running ATA133 drives right now, and they definitely don't even touch that.

Looks like the benefits don't stop at smaller cables. (btw, rounded IDE cables are definitely available if you're concerned about that, and they work just beautifully)

My question is: How similar is this technology to IEEE1394 (aka FireWire, i.Link, etc). Is it just an internal implementation? That's what I get from some of the tech briefs on the web.

from the serialata.org technical whitepaper, the protocol not only uses a serial method of data transmission (as opposed to the current parallel method), but the roadmap starts it at 150mb/s, then goes to 300mb/s and 600mb/s (!) as the technology advances. I'm running ATA133 drives right now, and they definitely don't even touch that.

Looks like the benefits don't stop at smaller cables. (btw, rounded IDE cables are definitely available if you're concerned about that, and they work just beautifully)

My question is: How similar is this technology to IEEE1394 (aka FireWire, i.Link, etc). Is it just an internal implementation? That's what I get from some of the tech briefs on the web.

What about ATA-133? SATA will support 150MB/s, will draw less power, use smaller cables, be directly connected therefore doing away with the master/slave and C/S problems. Plus it will scale to 300MB/s in a few years. Read all about it here and here and here.

However the Maxtor presentation talks about using SATA as a replacement for SCSI, or at a minimum breaking into NAS and low end servers.

Cable length is up to 3M from the Intel presentation.

Also for the number of devices, since it's now PTP connections, it's relatively agnostic as to the number of devices since it no longer fits into the old model of channels. I still haven't found specific references for the number of devices, but the Maxtor presentation has a picture of a SATA drop-in PCI card with 6 SATA connectors.

Benefits of Serial ATA
Serial ATA offers a number of benefits over Parallel ATA, including:

• Reductions in voltage and pin count
• Smaller, easier-to-route cables; elimination of the cable-length limitation
• Improved data robustness
• Backward compatibility

Voltage Reduction
Serial ATA's low-voltage requirement (500 millivolts [mV] peak-to-peak) will effectively alleviate the increasingly difficult-to-accommodate 5-volt signaling requirement that hampers the current Parallel ATA interface.

Cabling
The Serial ATA architecture replaces the wide Parallel ATA ribbon cable with a thin, flexible cable that can be up to 1 meter in length. The serial cable is smaller and easier to route inside the chassis (see Figure 2). The small-diameter cable can help improve air flow inside the PC system chassis and will facilitate future designs of smaller PC systems.

Improved Data Robustness
Serial ATA will offer more thorough error checking and error correcting capabilities than are currently available with Parallel ATA. The end-to-end integrity of transferred commands and data can be guaranteed across the serial bus.

Backward Compatibility
Serial ATA will provide backward compatibility for legacy Parallel ATA and ATAPI devices.

Taken from the Serial ATA website:

Q1:What is Serial ATA and Why is it being developed?
A1: Serial ATA is an evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA is scalable and will allow future enhancements to the computingplatform.

Q2: Previous efforts to transition to a serial bus were not successful. Why do you believe that Serial ATA will be successful?
A2: Serial ATA is a drop-in solution in that it is compatible with today's software, which will run on the new architecture without modifacation. It will provide for systems which are easier to design, with cables that are simple to route and install, smaller cable connectors, improve silicon design, and lower voltages which alleviate current design requirements in Parallel ATA.

Q3: Will there still be a parallel ATA bus when Serial ATA comes out?
A3: Serial ATA's adoption by the industry will follow a phased transition path. Therewill be a point where both Parallel and Serial ATA capabilities are available.

Q4: You stated that PCs implementing Serial ATA will be in the marketplace in2002. Why does it take so long to implement?
A4: The goal of the working group is to ensure the Serial ATA transition happens as smoothly and quickly as possible. The Serial ATA specification is expected to becomplete in the fall of 2000 with adoption to happen in the following 12 to 18 months.

Q5: What are the end user benefit of Serial ATA?
A5: End users will benefit by being able to easily upgrade their storage devices. Configuration of Serial ATA devices will be much simpler, with many of today's requirements on jumper and settings no longer needed.

Q6: What is the cost to implement Serial ATA in a system?
A6: The cost of Serial ATA technology will be on par with today's Parallel ATAtechnology.

Q7: Who are the members of the Serial ATA Working Group? Can new companies join?
A7: The Serial ATA promoters group includes APT Technologies Inc, Dell Computer Corporation, International Business Machines, Intel Corporation, Maxtor Corporation, Quantum Corporation, and Seagate Technology. Information on joining the working group is available at www.serialata.org and new members are welcome.

Q8: Hard disk data rates don't seem to be pushing the limits of current ATA66technology. Why is Serial ATA being planned now?
A8: Serial ATA is an evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storageinterface and will allow future enhancements to the computing platform. Specifically, thethinner Serial ATA cable addresses OEM's concerns regarding airflow around the Parallel ATA cable, and enables design of smaller PC chassis, as well as silicon vendors concerns regarding 5 volt tolerance support in future designs.

Q9: Will Serial ATA be compatible with today'sPCs?
A9:Serial ATA electronics and connectors will differ from Parallel ATA, however the technology is software compatible and OS transparent. It is anticipated that there will be adapters to facilitate forward- and backward-compatibility of hard disks on PC systems.

Q10: What is the impact of Serial ATA on OEMs?
A10: Industry benefits of Serial ATA include systems which are easier to design withcables that are simple to route and install, smaller cable connectors with improved silicondesign, lower voltage which alleviates current design requirements in Parallel ATA and compatibility with today's software which will run on the new architecture withoutmodification.

Q11: Beyond hard disks, will Serial ATA be used on floppy drives, optical drives,DVDs, and ZIP drives?
A11: Serial ATA supports all ATA and ATAPI devices, including CDs, DVDs, tapesdevices, high capacity removeable devices, zip drives, and CDRW's.

Q12: What is the impact of Serial ATA on IEEE1394 (aka Firewire) and on USB2in terms of PC system function?
A12: Serial ATA is planned to be the primary storage interface inside the PC system, and is not planned as an external interface to PC storage or peripherals. USB2 and IEEE1394 connections on the PC can be used where required as peripheral interfaces.

Q13: When does Microsoft plan to support Serial ATA in its OS's?
A13: Serial ATA is software compatible with Parallel ATA and requires no changes toMicrosoft operating systems, or any other OS as well.

Q14: What are the licensing requirements and costs of Serial ATA to companiesthat want to use the technology?
A14: When the Serial ATA specification is complete, it will be made available at nocharge. The working group expects to complete the specification later this year.

and way more informative... want specs? go here

Find specs and other technical info here.

The good news is that the technology to do this is cheap, proven, popular, and available now.

The bad news is that the motherboard and drive manufacturers are largely ignoring it in favor of standardizing on an ugly, unproven and untested hack that won't be available in consumer kit until 2004 at the earliest.

Why? You got me, captain. As far as I can tell, because they prefer paying patent licensing fees to Maxtor rather than Apple.

If I sound bitter, it's only because of the blood I've shed having to route IDE cables inside my Wintendo box.

Would you like fries with that wish come true?

That's why they're making SerialATA. Faster, hot swapable, and no more channelsx2 drive limit.

What about serial ATA -- we keep hearing about this. There is a lot of information at the serial ATA homepage.

> Or whatever happened to that newfangled serial interface Intel was working on?

You mean Serial ATA? It should be on the market Q4/01-Q4/02 but since it only deals with the physical/transport layers, it should work in addition to this proposal.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

What about InfiniBand, which all the major PC hardware design people seem to be involved with? This takes a "switched fabric" approach to linking function blocks together, via Switches (which is where Brocade hopes to be the next Cisco). Need more CPU power or more memory? Hot-plug a module into the Infiniband Switch. Version 1.0 of the spec. is available for download at the site, for those interested.

The successor to IDE is already on the way: Serial ATA. Reportedly, PC makers like it because the thin cables allow them to build smaller systems with better cooling. V1.0 is not going to be much faster than UltraATA/100, but they say there's room for growth there.

Plus, you can have fibre channel (not fiber) hard drives right now, from Seagate (example), IBM (example), etc., and the big storage guys are heading that way too. Fibre Channel doesn't always mean Optical - these drives use a 40-pin "copper" connection, which can be a cable or a backplane (for hot-plugging). The SCSI-3 protocol is carried over the Fibre Channel interface, meaning that with a FC driver loaded, the drives look like SCSI devices.

Anyone see a trend here? It's the end of the parallel interface in all its forms, much as USB and FireWire are replacing the humble parallel port...

Eventually you won't have to worry about rounding out your IDE cables. Low-end hard drives will go from parallel ATA to serial ATA. Serial ATA cables will be nice and thin with a lot few fewer conductors. You can read more about this at serialata.org, but the basic idea is that hard drives will transition to a software compatible, 1.5 Gb/s serial connection. Among the benefits promised are "easier routing of cables." A serial ATA drive has already demoed but they're not promising systems until 2002.

Let's assume a very optimistic 10MB/s
[...]
So it would take me about four hours to fill that disk with data. [...] What I'm saying is that we're approaching storage densities where our current data transfer busses simply can't reasonably cope anymore.

Actually, our busses are fine. SCSI runs at 160 MB/s (14 min for 140GB), ATA is at 100 MB/s (23 min for 140GB). You're referring to the storage devices, which currently peak at somewhere around the 20 MB/s mark. Nevertheless, the busses will improve, too. Serial ATA promises 6 gigabits in the not-so-distant future and surely there will be competitors.

The spec includes a four-wire interface, meaning we can finally say goodbye to filling our cases with cables, lower voltages (= less power drain since ATA requires 5V while SerialATA doesn't.) Plus, of course, plenty of transfer oomph. The first version is 1.5Gbps, scaling up to 6Gbps. Of course, it still doesn't try to replace SCSI. It never will.

(This has been discussed on slashdot before.)