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Serial ATA and USB 2
An anonymous reader pointed us to an anandtech article that discusses the future of
device attachment. Specifically USB 2:Electric Boogaloo and Serial ATA.
Definitely 2 standards will likely matter a lot in the future.
That Serial ATA stuff looks interesting...
MFM: sucked over two cables
ATA: sucks over a single cable, but much faster of late
Serial ATA?: sucks over a thinner wire, longer and stronger
As far as Serial ATA goes, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just adopt the SSA protocol for drive attachment? If it was widely adopted the price would come down significantly. As far as speed and flexibility, it is already further along that Serial ATA is attempting to be. I guess that since it comes from IBM, the odds of it being adopted elsewhere (despite the published spec) are slim, though.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
fellow karma whores:
in the interest of space conservation and sorting, and so that the rest of the discussion can be devoted solely to discussion of USB 2.0 and Serial ATA themselves, i would like to request that all Firewire-related flaming be posted as a reply to this message.
suggested topics:
-USB 2.0 is a pathetic excuse to destroy Firewire, designed solely to prevent a standard not controlled directly by Intel from gaining importance.
-Firewire/Serial ATA/USB 2.0 is not open enough in the sense that the open source movement would like it to be.
-Firewire is outrageously liscenced and expensive.
-USB 2.0 and Serial ATA will be far more widely used and supported than Firewire.
-Firewire will be far more widely used and supported than USB 2.0 and Serial ATA.
-WH04 D00D 1 \V4N7 4 830\VULF CLU573R 0F 1B00KZ
-[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is far technically superior to [Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0]
-[Firewire, Serial ATA, USB 2.0] is vaporware.
-by the time [if ever] USB 2.0 comes to market, Firewire will already be in its second generation and far superior to the USB 2.0's first generation in every way USB 2.0 defeats Firewire now.
-Firewire is already widely supported.
OK, have fun!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Their treatment of USB 2.0 was severely lacking. I wish Apple would drop its firewire tax (if not completely, then at least a few notches) so we could use a technology that was designed for things like this. This is the second time I've linked to this article today, but it's worth a read.
- http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html
- http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.ht ml
It's easier to just link to these articles than just rehash the same old arguments every time USB 2.0 is mentioned. Suffice it to say it'll be more than a day late and a dollar short, but, sadly, it will probably catch on due to Intel's stranglehold on the chip market. Once again, if Apple would ease up on the 1394 tax, we would all be better off (and Apple would have at least one victory against Wintel under its belt). Alas, they will not do that, so tomorrow's iMacs will probably ship with USB 2, 3, and 4, and FireWire 2, 3, and 4 will be quietly brushed under the rug._________________
rooooar
Every last bit of it. It never gets implemented or used though. USB sat on Intel motherboards from the 430HX chipsets and beyond. Never used until MS got off it's ass and put out Win98. And even now, we still see computers shipping with IRQ wasting PS/2 and serial/parallel ports.
If there's one thing I admire Apple for, it's their periphreal design. Even on the OLD Macs there was ADB. Then Apple decided to use USB. And look at the iMac. Or a new G4 for that matter. Pure simplicity for ports on the back.
With things like this Serial ATA and Firewire, you can even eliminate the clutter *inside* the computer. I just hope it finally HAPPENS! Why do I have to pay for all those serial/parallel ports on my machine? If we'd all just *forget* about them the price on USB stuff would go way down.
Where's the ideal PC? No mucking with IRQ hogs, no mucking with old IDE, serial or parallel technology. And when we see it, heres to hoping Linux runs on it.
Suggestion -- if you number the items on the list, it's easier for the "me too!" people. Like, I could say "3, 4, 7, 9, 10!!!" to indicate my support for those items in your list.
Maybe this is the next generation of Slashdot posting... when the answers are so predictable, just number them, then we can all just post/vote for our favorites.
_________________
rooooar
I think we need to see more open communication protocols - life is so much easier. The success of the already open protocols is readily evident - yet there are still closed standards which take considerable effort to reverse engineer. You'd think people would see that the protocols can be strengthened when the are opened up and security problems or whatnot are reaveled - it is easier to fix with a large community of knowledgable users than with a small group. When will we see more of this? We really need to.
-Leo
That standard is IEEE-1394, also known as FireWire or i-Link.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 runs at very high speed over inexpensive cabling consisting of only two pairs of signal lines and one pair for power. The cabling does not impede airflow like parallel ATA cables.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be used to transfer data to or from ATA (IDE) interfaces, completely transparently to the host.
Like Serial ATA, 1394 can be (and is) implemented in extremely cheap chips. In fact, there are sub-$5 "tailgate" chips which provide a single-chip 1394-to-ATA adapter. If 1394 was integrated into the drive instead of Parallel ATA, the drive could actually be cheaper than it is now.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 can also be used to connect SCSI devices, digital cameras, digital audio and video, TCP/IP networking, and many other categories of devices. 1394 already appears to be the interface of choice for most upcoming consumer electronic gear.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already a recognized standard, and work is already underway to extend it to speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports complex topologies: devices with multiple 1394 ports for daisy chaining and hubs. This provides considerable flexibility in how devices are hooked up.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 supports multiple masters on the same bus.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is available NOW, and is already built into some computers.
UNLIKE Serial ATA, 1394 is already supported by Microsoft Windows, and to some extent, Linux.
So why do we need a new standard?
Part of the problem is probably Intel. Initially they announced that they were a supporter of 1394, and that they would build support for it into all of their chipset. They did this with USB, and now it's hard to buy a PC without USB. But when push came to shove, for some reason they didn't do it. Apparently this is due to their work on "USB 2", which pushes the speed of USB into the same range as 1394, but unfortunately still has most or all of the limitations of USB.
Part of the problem is probably Apple. They made ridiculous royalty demands ($1/port), and scared many vendors away. They've since backed down to much more reasonable numbers, but some of the damage was done.
Part of the problem is probably the ATA committee itself. They may be experiencing "NIH" syndrome, preferring to invent a new standard rather than using an existing one, no matter how suited the existing one is.
Part of the problem is just the standard chicken-and-egg question. If computers don't have 1394 interfaces, why should disk manufacturers build 1394 into disk drives? If disk drives don't have 1394, why should computer manufacturers build 1394 into the computers? Of course, serial ATA may have the same problem, but it may be less pronounced. The very fact that serial ATA is less functional may make it an easier sell from a marketing point of view.
What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard.
As far as USB 2.0 goes, well, I don't have any USB devices yet, so I guess I really don't care at this point.
I'm sure I've said several idiotic things here, so anyone who's more of an expert in these matters, please smack me around a bit.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, nic, and headphones coming from my computer. None of them use any new fancy expensive technology. Is the ordinary user going to have every gadget in the world on his/her computer? Does anyone need 256(?) devices? Who wants to pay more for a usb mouse when it is less supported and more expensive? I don't think I need it and I'm intrested in knowing what kind of people do. Maybe everything will be USB someday and make things simpler, but I think everything is fine how it is. So... can anyone tell me how this will revolutionize computing?
and other fun stuff.
/printer/devices were very scarse until iMac owners needed printers and new mice/keyboards..
http://www.firewireworld.com/
also EVERY digital videocamera uses firewrie. If you want to hook up a DV camera to a computer you got to use firewire.
If its a mac its got firewire (except ibook)
If its a sony vaio its got i link (firewire with a different name)
Some compaqs offer it too.
Odd though, USB
But any new technology should have a chance. If its worse it will fail (this isn't always true, as marketing counts but I digress.)
Apple was charging a $1/port as of Jan 991 5/firewire.html
e wfirewirelincensing.html
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/january/9901
Then it went to a $0.25/system as of May 99
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/may/990512/n
How much more do you want it dropped, btw?
Does this mean Intel is charging nothing for it's USB implementations? Or that it's hidden in the costs of their chipsets, CPUs, etc?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Unfortunetely, they will not be able to kill firewire. But hopefully these threats will bring down the licensing costs of firewire down. Rambus is dealing with this now (make it cheaper or die).
USB2.0 is a big technical challange, and USB wasn't made for it. The problem will be largely with older usb devices attached to the same bus.
Serial ATA and FC are going to eliminate SCSI. In fact SerialATA doesn't have all the checkpoints to compete with firewire. The only reason it is a threat is that this pushes firewire out of the DeviceBay standard, but that's years away from shipping.
Firewire will still persist for the a/v crowd and that will slip more and more into consumer products. Firewire will quadrople in speed soon, so USB2.0 would still be slow.
Apple et all has lowered the cost to $0.25 per system, as opposed to $1 per port
Firewire licensing
So unless you think $0.25 per system is unreasonable(up the wazoo?), perhaps Firewire *does* rock?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
It's because until iMacs came about, there was no *reason* to use USB; serial/parallel/PS2 all coexisted.
So Intel didn't push USB very much until after Apple did. You'd think Intel would return the favor by supporting Firewire, just to be fair.
I like Firewire. Unfortunately, the PC support is so poor, my next PC may have to be a Mac!(I have a DV camcorder)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
May just be an iMac running Linux, then...
I mean, about the only thing missing is the Firewire HDs...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
AFAIK, Firewire is not intended for use with internal devices. (Its internal counterpart is Device Bay, which, unfortunately, looks pretty dead.)
For that matter, Serial ATA is not intended for external devices, so they're really apples and oranges. (No pun intended.)
I, for one, am excited to see somebody is finally addressing the issue of internal connections. Installing a "parallel" ATA drive seems like such a cumbersome process in the era of USB.
MSK
The point of using USB or Firewire is simplicity; only 2 or 3 ports on the back of the PC, maybe the monitor, maybe the keyboard.
Which means, fundamentally, users won't have to figure out cables, converters, passthroughs.
Which means the ordinary user will plug his monitor(maybe) into his USB or Firewire port in the back, and then the keyboard into the monitor, or into the back, if desired, and then the mouse into the keyboard, or the monitor, or whatever. And then plug in the speakers. And the mic. And the modem. And the headphones. And the printer.
All with 2 or 3 ports.
Vs the 8 ports today(2 PS2, 2 USB, 2 parallel, 2 serial)
So just by dropping PS2, parallel, and serial, price goes down.
As does support costs for motherboard design, BIOs, drivers, OSes, and drivers having to deal with all of the above.
Whoever said USB would revolutionize it, anyway? It's an incremental improvement!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Bandwidth is only limited by the size of your pipe. Now we only have the little problem of encoding the stream and we're all set. Besides, the garden hose interface is already backwards compatible with almost 100% of existing installations, and even works with ancient peripherals. It can also be daisy-chained for near infinite lengths (if you have a good interface) and supports mid-hose taps to create a string of sprinklers.
Most importantly, when you attach your garden hose to a sprinkler you have a great way to keep yourself cool on those really hot days when your air conditioning goes out and you just can't stand the heat from your CPU a moment longer.
marotti.com
How about politics? Apple pushes Firewire, Intel pushes USB?
What does that have to do with the cost?
A firewire board costs $80 because of the costs of the PCI board, the drivers, the support, etc.
Imagine, if Intel just put firewire support into their chipset? What would it cost?
How about the cost of just the connectors?
I mean, of course the implementation is what makes firewire cost $80. How much does a add on USB board cost, then?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Can anyone out there give a (succinct) description of what the technical difficulties of increasing bandwidth are? I understand about s/n ratio, sort of, but do not really understand the recent trend towards the serial. For example, precisely *why* is it that ATA cannot be extended any further without signalling changes.
BTW, I while ago I saw someone apologise for being an EE instead of a CS. I would apologise for being a CS instead of an EE, except I'm neither! ;-)
____________________
He who fights and runs away,
_________________
rooooar
If you can't connect a reasonable number of devices to a serial ATA chain (like, oh, 15, for instance?) it sounds to me like more hype than substance.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Does anyone know if Serial ATA will support more than 4 devices? With my two hard drive, zip drive, and DVD drive, I don't have any room for tape backup! And no, I can't afford the inflated price of SCSI. And with Apple making computers now with ATA interfaces, SCSI is set to get even more expensive.
Of course, I may be an exception here, with all four PCI slots, all four ATA slots, my AGP slot, and one ISA slot filled. At least I still have one memory slot left.... Anyone know where to find a motherboard with more expansion capabilities?
Not unless iMacs and Apple dies.
Not unless Sony stops making iLink camcorders, CDRWs, VCRs, digital TVs, and notebooks
Not unless Canon, Phillips, et al also stop making Firewire devices
Not unless Intel can push something better and cheaper than Firewire to all the above companies
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Ok here goes:
I have a USB mouse.
I have a USB printer.
We are supposedly going to flat screens with digital video cards. So we may as well make that a USB port too.
Another USB cable carrying digital sound to your subs/speakers.
A USB joystick.
A USB keyboard.
So whats that leave. RJ45 net connection and a phone line. I can't see those changing anytime soon.
So really why can't we have a whole shit load of USB ports and an RJ45 and RJ11, isn't that all that is needed? Two standards, RJ and USB, sounds good to me. Its probably just a matter of time....
For the technically inclined out there, USB for video is the only weakness I see, if you have guranteed sufficient bandwidth and a digital signal there is no reason it shouldn't work?
USB, internal/external FireWire, PCI, AGP, no legacy crap(except MacOS 9, soon that will be gone too)
Unfortunately for the BSD folk, and fortunately for those that have appreciated the outgrowth of Linux, technical considerations were not the only issue. There was this "minor" matter of the USL lawsuit.
As it turns out, with Linux, as well as with Firewire, technology is not the only issue; licensing constraints figure prominently. Extremely prominently.
People were scared off of *BSD, whether rightly or wrongly, by the fear of the effects of the lawsuit.
And it appears that Apple is doing a good number on the adoption of Firewire, perhaps, simply, by their existence. After all, after the discontinuance of Newton, and the fun of "What variation of NeXTstep will we stop selling today?" it appears unwise to trust too much to the good graces of Apple.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I guess IP over Firewire is already implemented and working exclusively on Linux. I *really* hope this takes off :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Nobody? Wow, what a surprise. Congratulations, you've taken the first step to peecee recovery: admitting that peecees aren't really what you want. Now, in that context, is serial ata really what you want either? No? Baby steps, kid, baby steps. You'll get there eventually. Hopefully the companies that know how to make what you really want will still be around by the time you realize what that is.
Fscking peecee lusers and their super-duper "standards" from their savior Intel. I'm going to go retch now. You think about what I've said.
I hope this "standard" goes down in flames. We have the opportunity to ditch the decrepit kludge known as ATA/IDE and what does Intel do? They scrape off some of the rust and add chrome mud flaps. They should be ashamed of themselves. Serial ATA is register compatible with the WD1003 disk controller. If you don't know what that is, ask your parents. It was introduced for the IBM PC/AT when 40 MB disk drives were hot stuff. All this "standard" does is to replace a parallel cable with a serial cable. It intentionally leaves all the accumulated crud of the ATA interface in place. There is no reason to drag this baggage into the future. ATA should be deprecated and replaced with a modern I/O interface such as IEEE-1394 or SCSI over a high speed, hot pluggable, serial interface.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm not sure which of the competing serial standards achieve this, but it is impressive that the computer-guts pictures in the article show that they not only eliminated the ribbon cables, but the thumb-thick bundle of power wires also.
"I don't know much about hardware, but I know what I like"
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
1. Serial ATA is an internal standard, Firewire is an external standard (although it can be used internally). Explain to me why Apple includes ATA drives inside the G4 when it has an internal Firewire port?
2a. You do not need topology internal to the computer. So hubs and daisychaining is meaningless.
2b. Since four ports of Serial ATA could technically operate in parallel (the bandwidth is not shared), four devices have a combined available bandwidth of 600 MB/s, as opposed to firewire's 400 Mbps (~40 MB/s)
2c. The max bandwidth of firewire, 3.2 Gbps, is ~320 MB/s, making it about the same speed as two Serial ATA ports running at the initial speed (which is not the maximum bandwidth)
3. Serial ATA is a point to point protocol. There is no master.
4. Serial ATA is already supported under both windows and linux, past the extent of IEEE1394. This is because Serial ATA uses the same protocol as regular ATA, and thus works exactly the same on an OS level. Unless you look at the chipset, the OS probably will not know it isn't using parallel ATA.
5. ATA is a cheaper solution than Firewire. Currently all firewire drives are actually ATA drives with a ATA<->Firewire chip inside, so Serial ATA reduces their cost, as well as requires a smaller engineering cost to change the chips on the drive to be native Serial ATA.
6. <i>What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard.</i>
What makes you think that Serial ATA is a proprietary interface?? Why would it be any less of an open standard than Parallel ATA? At least you don't need to pay licensing fees for ATA.
This is my opinion, moderate down accordingly
Ooops! I guess that Apple's decision to require license fees for each Firewire connector was the first nail in Firewire's coffin...
See what happens when you'te too greedy? People just ignore you...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
- 1. Serial ATA is an internal standard, Firewire is an external standard (although it can be used internally). Explain to me why Apple includes ATA drives inside the G4 when it has an internal Firewire port?
Because firewire drives aren't exactly ubiquitous.- 2a. You do not need topology internal to the computer. So hubs and daisychaining is meaningless.
Do you know what topology is? ATA has a topology. SCSI has a topology. In both cases, the controller card acts basically as a hub. Also, external SCSI devices have been daisychained for years (whereas internal ones have tended to be on parallel buses).- 2b. Since four ports of Serial ATA could technically operate in parallel (the bandwidth is not shared), four devices have a combined available bandwidth of 600 MB/s, as opposed to firewire's 400 Mbps (~40 MB/s)
Yes, but you're also still limited to two devices per controller, and I doubt we'll be seeing any motherboards with a bungload of controllers very soon. SCSI, on the other hand, started out with 7 devices per controller to begin with, and currently has 15 if memory serves.- 2c. The max bandwidth of firewire, 3.2 Gbps, is ~320 MB/s, making it about the same speed as two Serial ATA ports running at the initial speed (which is not the maximum bandwidth)
This is true. Now find an application in consumer devices (which is what both ATA and Firewire are designed for) where you need more than that, or even have the ability to use more than that.- 3. Serial ATA is a point to point protocol. There is no master.
So's firewire, except in an even looser sense, since you can have an arbitrary peer-to-peer connection between any two devices on the bus (which, admittedly, leads to some potential security concerns, and is why I wouldn't want an external port to be on the same bus as my hard drive)- 4. Serial ATA is already supported under both windows and linux, past the extent of IEEE1394. This is because Serial ATA uses the same protocol as regular ATA, and thus works exactly the same on an OS level. Unless you look at the chipset, the OS probably will not know it isn't using parallel ATA.
This is true. However, the ATA protocol in general is somewhat antiquated. Even getting more than four drives in a system is a horrible hack, and more than eight might as well not even be considered.- 5. ATA is a cheaper solution than Firewire. Currently all firewire drives are actually ATA drives with a ATAFirewire chip inside, so Serial ATA reduces their cost, as well as requires a smaller engineering cost to change the chips on the drive to be native Serial ATA.
As someone else already pointed out in this thread, there's firewire chips for around $5, which are considerably cheaper, AFAIK, than the current crop of parallel ATA chips. Also, it'll probably be a while before serial ATA drives aren't setup in the same way - a parallel ATA drive with a serial ATA convertor on it.- 6.
- What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard. What makes you think that Serial ATA is a proprietary interface?? Why would it be any less of an open standard than Parallel ATA? At least you don't need to pay licensing fees for ATA.
I'm not the poster you're responding to, so your question doesn't apply to my response, and actually, I agree with your point, but for the sake of argument: $0.25/computer isn't exactly bank-breaking, and you don't even have to call it that if you call it something other than Firewire AFAIK (for example, if you call it IEEE1394 there's no problem, or you can make up yet another new name for it like Sony did).---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Really, comparing the before and after of ATA and Serial ATA?
Parallel ATA picture-lots of ribbon cables and power supply cables, looks like your typical floppy, CD, single hard drive setup.
Serial ATA picture-just a single serial(two or four conductor wire) for each drive. No power. I guess that those Serial ATA drives (floppy too?) won't require 5v and 12v power. or at least will only pull 40mAh or so...
oh well, it is a nice concept, but the pictures are a bit misleading.
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Yet strangely, it sorta fits...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Serial ATA will only make sense if you can connect more than two damned devices to the chain.
If you had read the article, you would know that Serial-ATA is nothing like conventional IDE, and is a serial design, with a low-pin-count connector and a point-to-point design. You can have precisely one device connected to an SATA port. The idea is, of course, to have a bunch of SATA ports on the mainboard (you should be able to stuff six or eight in the space needed for existing 40-pin ATA ports).
Personally, I prefer firewire, which does support daisy-chaining.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Does anyone know if Serial ATA will support more than 4 devices?
First, the article states quite clearly that Serial ATA is a point-to-point protocol. This means one and only one device connected per port. As SATA also has a low pin count, the plan is to have more SATA ports on the mainboard. You could probably fit six or eight SATA ports in the space needed for two 40-pin ATA ports.
Second, ATA has a limitation of two devices per bus (port). You get four devices by having two ATA ports. Want six devices? Use three ATA ports. Most likely, you'll need to buy an add-in ATA controller, as I've never seen or heard of a mainboard with more then two on-board ATA ports. Of course, ATA is incredibly brain-damaged, and generally requires an IRQ per bus on PCs (or breaks compatibility with many things). The answer to that, of course, is not to use ATA... :)
And no, I can't afford the inflated price of SCSI.
You can afford all that nifty hardware, but you cannot afford an extra $30 per device in order to get a bus that actually works and performs well? Well, your loss. :-) Me, I've been running an all-SCSI system for some time, and I love it. No looking back for me!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The same is true for Serial ATA drives. You can bet that the first Serial ATA drives will NOT be cheaper than equivalent Parallel ATA drives. That will only happen as they ramp the volume.
If there was customer demand, they could start ramping production of 1394 drives now. Why should we wait until mid 2001 for them to start ramping Serial ATA? (I addressed this question in my earlier post.)
You need a non-trivial topology any time you want to hook up more devices than you have dedicated ports. If manufactured in equivalent quantities, hardware support for four 1394 ports (at 3.2 Gbps by 2001) should not cost more than four Serial ATA ports. Sure, but why compare two Serial ATA ports to only one 1394 port? With either interface the per-port cost will be about the same, but 1394 will offer 3.2 Gbps at about the same time that Serial ATA 1X will offer 1.5 Gbps. Probably sooner, in fact. Of course there's a master. The computer is the master; the disk drive is the slave. 1394 supports any mix of masters and slaves. If all you want to do is add one disk drive to a PC, you don't need that capability. But why restritct yourself if you don't have to? If you want to realize the claimed 1.5 Gbps performance of Serial ATA 1X, you'll probably need a different hardware-level register interface, with different device driver software (at the lowest level; some higher-level driver code may stay the same).It is true that 1394 hardware interfaces are not register-compatible with ATA ports, but 1394 drivers are already written.
Parallel ATA is cheaper today because it is manufactured in high volumes. Neither Serial ATA nor 1394 drives will be cheaper than Parallel ATA until and unless drives incorporating those interface start get manufactured in high volumes. Once the volumes are that high, Serial ATA or 1394 drives should be cheaper to manufacture than Parallel ATA, because they can use chips with lower pin counts, smaller board footprint, and fewer connector pins or edge fingers.Since both Serial ATA or 1394 offer the potential for higher performance than Parallel ATA at lower cost, but both would cost about the same amount, why not prefer the one with greater flexibility and performance.
Bad choice of words on my part. What I really meant was "a new and incompatible interface". Why use one of those, instead of a superior existing interface?I've sorta been hoping for the demise of ATA/IDE and then THIS news comes along. Of course other people have said it but I will too. IDE is a naturally inferior device interface in these times of lots of internal drives and massive amounts of storage. IDE has been one of the key determining factors in the shape and design of current PCs. Mid-towers are by far the most popular case design out now and even the desktop design before that only had four internal bays, as do most towers you can find now. There are only four bays because that is the limit on IDE drives unless you have an IDE expension card. ATA-100 is just stupid in my opinion, with a limit of devices per channel there's no way in hell to max out a channel's bandwidth unless you have a solid state drive. Even IF you maxed out two drives their internal transfer doesn't even come close to the max amount of bandwidth you have available. Not only is there a bunch of bandwidth wasted each drive needs an IRQ and DMA address, SCSI/FireWire only need a single DMA and IRQ since addressing is done between the devices and the controller. I've been chanting for IEEE 1394 to take over internal and external higher bandwidth devices and relagating USB to interfaces and small bandwidth outputs. Having one 400Mb/s (approx 50MB/s) bus would be really efficient for internal drives. Your 10x DVD and 7200rpm hard drive MIGHT fill up the wire but they'd need to be running full transfer at the same time. Even then you could just put other devices on another wire (like the S-ATA shematic). I support FireWire systems in the future for several reasons: less internal addresses used, super duper simple installation, fault tolerance, identical internal and external interface. Less internal addresses is good for the person who buys a full tower and fills it up with toys, easy installation helps everyone, fault tolerance means a loose cable won't totalfuck your RAID, and identical interfaces means removable drives or easily transportable devices that natively support hot swapping. As for USB 2.0 whoopdefrick.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
cos USB is gonna kill you on video and hard drives.
;)
USB for low-bandwith devices - keyboards, mice, consumer printers (real men use ethernet printers
Firewire for high-bandwith devices - hard drives, digital audio/video, high-end scanners (the kind that cost more than your car and if misused could sterilize you)
Note that you don't really want to use either for your monitor - think about how much data 1600x1200x24 bits, 30 times a second _is_. Give it its own damn bus.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The big problem with USB devices is installing device drivers. It doesn't "just work" because you can't guarantee that there are working drivers for it. So I propose this: Spec for devices to contain enough flash memory for drivers for the target platforms. So, a mouse might contain 4mb of flash memory to contain basic drivers for the various Windows, Mac, even Linux. When the device is plugged in, the drivers are grabbed via some low level USB protocol, and installed on the fly. Furthermore, if you get newer drivers off a Web site, they can be flashed back to the device again. Why don't we have this now? I want it. I want it.
Doesn't the Firewire tax only apply to the use of the trademark "Firewire"? From what I gathered, if you call it by the official (and much less sexy) name IEEE1394, you pay nothing.
"...for the sake of argument: $0.25/computer isn't exactly bank-breaking..."
Most OEM's try to save and scrimp every penny on production that they possibly can, because small differences in price start to add up in quantities of 10000 or more. That $0.25 per computer would equal $2500 across 10000 computers. (Just keep adding zeros, it adds up pretty quick.) That extra expense is that much money that the OEM isn't making in profit. It boils down to the problem of the production going to the lowest bidder, or in this case, the part with the lowest price. Parts that have royalty fees attached to them (take firewire and rambus as examples) tend to be overlooked more often than parts that are more freely/cheaply available, even if/when the alternative is less advanced in terms of technology. In a business sense, it's all about profit, not necessarily about what should or should not be done.
But the computer industry is all about momentum. How long will you wait for something which is "real soon now" for such a long time?
The real problem is not getting the bits from A to B. The software abstraction layers, descriptors and class definitions were the parts that took the most time in the USB standards commitees. Microsoft's insistence on making USB one more jewel on Windows 98's crown also contributed a significant delay.
But this is nothing compared to how long 1394 is taking. An environment with no single master is much more complex. But you should also take into account the commitee effect - they have vast plans with cute acronyms to make it take control of everything in your house. Yeah, sure.
USB 2.0 will be identical to 1.1 from the operating system's point of view. It will use the same class drivers and in some cases the same vendor-supplied drivers. This will enable it to reach the market in a relatively short time.
It's not that I'm "pro USB" and "anti 1394" - both have interesting features the the other lacks. It's just reality.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
1600x1200x24x60/8=345.6 MB/s.
Its going to have to wait for USB3.0 I guess. The question is what is more effort: A little more design with the USB 3.0 standard or one less different cable for the end users.
Video card makers could make more efficient use of the bandwidth where they only peak at that number, just send the information that changes fron frame to frame, kind of MPEGish, but without the blocks.
The reason I am also pushing this is to only get the stores to sell one type of cable. The 4$ cables they sell for $35 because the pins are gold plated, give me a break. With one type of cable, price gouging would almost surely go away.
How many serial ATA devises can a system support most systems today are limited to 6 or less and that's only if you add a second controller that may sound like plenty but by the time you add a couple hard drives a dvd ROM a CD-ROM a zip drive a orb drive and if they ever set a standard for it a dvd +rw drive and a cdrw your out of luck for any thing else. Also they didn't mention any specifics about how it works with multiple drives unless it has changed with the current ATA 33 and 66 standards ATA relied on switching witch meant that it couldn't access more that one drive at a time. Which means that your performance is going to start to suffer if your machine tries too read from different disks at the same time the last thing is more a rant than a question when are they going to add more system resources? This being limited to 15 IRQ's and a hand full of dma's is a major pain in the ass. All the new systems coming out with ridicule numbers of pci slots and things like usb integrated on the motherboard that take resources I would like to add a hardware mpg card but the only way I can do it is to remove some thing
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
I think that Intel is making some really stupid choice lately:
1) Rambus vs DDR SDRAM: every memory manufacturers was against Rambus, because they would have to pay royalties to Rambus, and that the size of silicon would be much greater, and that DDR SDRAM would be much cheaper with similar performances.
The result is that we're starting only now to have very pricey Rambus (after the i820 chipset disaster) and that Intel now tells that they would use Rambus for desktop and DDR SDRAM for server..
DOES IT MAKE SENSE to use a (according to Intel) better and more expensive Rambus technology for desktop and a cheaper memory technology for servers ?
If Intel had been less stubborn, we would have now DDR SDRAM at only a marginal increase of price... Thanks Intel, really!
2) USB vs Firewire vs ATA, if Intel had pushed firewire into PC instead pushing USB and ATA, in one year we would have true firewire HDD, and it would make cheaper PC because there is only a need for two bus: a cheap low-power one, for keybords, mouse and a fast one for HDD, linking to high speed external devices.
Thanks to Intel, in 5 years we will still have USB-1, USB-2 (if it is released), ATA, Firewire (for anyone who wants to use a DV camera) instead of just USB-1 and Firewire.
Some could say that Apple's charging 0.25$ per Firewire port is the problem, but I don't think that it is too expensive, Intel's NIH syndrome is the major culprit here.
What puzzles me if why Intel competitors do not include Firewire in their chipset, it would be a major selling point for customers, if given the choice which chipset will they choose if someone explain them that if they choose the Intel one, if they buy a DV camera, they would have to buy also a ($100 ?) extention card to use it with their PC?
AMD, VIA are you listening ? I want DDR SDRAM and Firewire in not too expensive chipsets!
i've been thinking about this a great deal over the last minute and a half, and i realized something very important: an ibook beowulf cluster would, indeed, be a pretty cool idea. one word: Airport.
Airport would serve wonderfully as the high-speed private network Beowulf requires. and it would very much help with logistics-- no cabling required, which makes things a LOT easier. hell, you could just take the ibooks and stack them in the corner of the room. no messy cables or overloaded hubs.
While ibooks themselves would maybe be a tad expensive to buy them for just this purpose-- after all, you're paying for an LCD screen you won't use-- i'm wondering about what happens when iBooks start getting passed out to grade school students. Think about it; you've got about 20, 30 children per room. ach one is holding an ibook, and most of these are going unused for most of the time. So install the beowulf software on each ibook and have the school network propigate tasks to be used with the spare processor cycles. Suddenly this isn't a grade school anymore; it's a _supercomputer_, with upward of a couple hundred parrallel ibook nodes. This would go beyond cracking RC5 or ripping mp3s for the school administrator; you could actually rent out task time on the ibook beowulf the way they rent out supercomputers at universities. It would be a lot less reliable in terms of exact time because the students would be using some of the computing power to themselves, but still it could work pretty good, and maybe give some extra money to the schools. our schools are underfunded anyway, and hell- if they did something like this to bring in a little extra money, maybe they could _afford_ things like a decent computer network or computer teachers or laptops for the students.
And i'm sure the beowulf software would run wonderfully on the BSD core of mac os x. How well would Beowulf run in a loosely structured dynamic environment such as a school where the nodes of the network are being periodically individually shuffled around into different physical areas of the network, of out of it?
just a thought.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Several posters have made comments that Apple has dropped their Firewire tax to a reasonable price of $0.25, so it shouldn't be a problem.
There's a little casualty issue here. Apple only dropped their prices *after* other companies began casting about for alternatives. Here's a MacKiDo quote concerning a 3 port solution: "Apple is now seeking US$3 in royalties on a 1394 chipset that sells for less than US$5." They go on to say that it was possible that "some of Apple's competitors--perhaps like Intel--are being charged higher licensing fees than those cooperating with the Macintosh platform." We don't know if that's true, but if Apple attempted to use 1394 as a weapon, then the reasons for USB 2.0 and Serial ATA are obvious.
Intel could have changed course after Apple dropped their prices, but sometimes projects acquire a life of their own once started. Intel did not charge any royalities for the original USB and announced that they planned to do the same for USB 2.0, so it's got a lot of external support as well. Plus, I haven't seen any guarantees from Apple that they won't raise the tax again if Firewire becomes the standard.
> As someone else already pointed out in this
> thread, there's firewire chips for around $5
That figure seems to be somewhat anecdotal. I'd like to see some facts backing it up. AFAIK the slowest-speed node on Firewire is still 100 Mbps, which is a lot of bandwidth for a lowly micro. OTOH a low-speed USB node of 1.5 Mbps can be implemented completely with an 8051 or less. That's why you start seeing a proliferation of cheap USB devices--many are low speed, don't require a 12 Mbps chipset, and can be implemented with a micro that might be doing all the other work as well. Because, frankly, even complete USB chipsets aren't that cheap.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Most of the general computing public never even open their computers, and do very few upgrades. The /. readership, I believe, is more of an enthusiast group. Sure, we're sick of opening PCs and dealing with ribbon cables, but this is not necessarily the factor that will drive execs and engineers to design new standards which will be good for the enthusiast.
What companies will make is what will be cheapest to manufacture and integrate with today's technology, look the best on paper (and ads), and what will offer the consumer the greatest opportunity to buy more peripherals.
With the convergence of video, audio, and computer technologies, IEEE 1394 does offer an excellent opportunity for the computer industry to adopt a standard which will integrate consumer electronics with PCs. Apple realizes this. USB seems like a great replacement for serial and parallel I/O, but it's not ready right now.
Of course, USB 2.0 and Serial ATA will enjoy the same advantages that have given Intel architecture and IDE technology their long standing in the industry. There is a difference, which is that computers are not nearly as expensive as they were 10 years ago. The industry can afford to dump old technology in place of commodity items.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
Firewire devices ARE all SCSI at the moment, which is part of why the hard drives are so damn expensive.
That is totally wrong.
Some FW devices, like DV cams, are "pure" 1394.
Some FW devices, like hard drives, are IDE and use a bridge chip.
The hard drives are not that expensive by the way. You can get an IDE bridge case for less than $150. Buy your favorite IDE drive. You now have a FireWire device.
For instance, Buy.com is/was selling FW bridge cases for around $110. Pair that with a Maxtor 27.2GB 7200rpm drive at $200 (or less) and you have a high capacity high speed external FireWire drive for less than $310. That is not a bad price considering the convenience and advantages of FireWire.
Ben
I think there are a few details people tend to forget when comparing Serial ATA to Firewire:
1: All of those extra features Firewire has means more complexity, more problems, and longer development times. One of the biggest things ATA has going for it is that it's so simple. Since the master (the OS) deals with command queuing, error recovery, etc., the devices can be stupid, and stupid is easy to design. Quoting from the article:
"They've made it clear that they're focused on providing a Parallel ATA replacement without adding too many bells and whistles to weigh down the specification and increase the cost of implementation."
2: Changing a product to Serial ATA requires almost exclusively a hardware change, while changing to Firewire would require hardware, software, and firmware changes. From my experiences with SCSI and Fibre Channel devices, I'm guessing that switching from ATA to Firewire will require more than just swapping out a protocol chip to give the drive enough smarts to handle the additional protocol overhead. I doubt ATA devices have anything similar to a standard microprossesor, but more complicated protocols require complex protocol chips with stuff like full RISC cores in them.
3: Backwards compatibility is cool. It's so much easier for a company to jump on the new bandwagon if they've got a net to catch them in the form of a parallel to serial ATA converter. They don't have to worry about "when will all of the other companies support Firewire, so someone will buy my product?"
4: In the low-margins market of desktop computers, a $0.25 licencing fee for Firewire still matters. Think of $0.25 per drive in the volumes that a drive manufacture deals with.
To quote from the article, "Most important is the fact that Serial ATA is software/register compatible with Parallel ATA, which means there is no need to rewrite anything at the driver or OS level."
Which means that Linux and Windows already support it, and not merely "to some extent".
Firewire is by far the technologically superior standard. I like technologically superior tools; that's why I have two Beta VCRs rotting in my attic. But I think SATA is going to be very popular for internally-connected devices like disk and tape drives, if only so manufacturers can avoid the higher cost of adopting an entirely new standard instead of just building off the existing one. As a manufacturer, which would you rather do: hand the team a full specification and tell them to implement it, or give them your existing code base and say, "hack this so it does I/O one bit at a time instead of eight"?
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This is not my sandwich.
I recently bought a USB mouse, the MouseMan Wheel, because I wanted to a) have a wheel everyone's been talking about, b) move my current mouse to my full-time linux box (as opposed to my linux/win98 timeshare box), and c) because I like the idea of a USB and want to support it, and I think the connectors are really cool, and, yes, serial and ps/2 suck and I don't like them.
Well, the mouse was auto-detected properly and all sorts of cool stuff, but then it would run for a bit, and then freeze my computer. Not just the mouse, but the whole computer. I upgraded the drivers, various things like that, but it still kept doing it, so I just plugged it into the ps/2 adapter and so now I have a ps/2 mouse. I don't know if it's my USB (motherboard and/or drivers) or my mouse drivers or what. I sure am glad Logitech provides all the different forms of connectors, though. So, yeah, that's my little story, my only experience with USB, I hope you all liked it.
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Couldn't you do serial ATA with FireWire and a software intermediate layer?
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
SCSI is busmaster-based: only one drive can use the bus at a time. FireWire is packet-based, so a number of drives that can't hit 50MB/s taken individually can share the bus and saturate it.
I don't know the details of the FireWire standard/protocol, but it seems that fast controllers and a complex protocol make designing the devices expensive. So, I'd say FireWire for everything fast, ADB for cheap+quickly designed crap.
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Ex-queez me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what Firewire is for?? And wasn't 1394 first developed for the PC market originally??
I'm not afraid of the dark. Far from it. Just.... only when the lights are off!
From anyone else's point of view, that's still anecdotal. AFAIK, the only authoritative way to get pricing on the chips is to get quotes from the vendors.
Certainly they are. You can get the silicon for a low speed (1.5 Mbps) USB device from Cypress for under $1 in volume; the high-speed (12 Mbps) chips aren't much more.It's either all or nothing. I think that mixing USB/regular stuff is a mess. I sort of see it like mixing object pascal and C++ together to make a program. Even though it works fine, it is sort of messy. If I want to use USB, I only want to have to fool with USB; meaning that I want to plug everything into my computer with USB ports (hd,nic,monitor,sound?). Right now, maybe this would be possibly but there is definately a lack of options (hardware) and support.
I bet you have things on your computer that don't fit into the usb or rj45 category..like harddrive or monitor as someone mentioned