Slashdot Mirror
Serial ATA 1.0 Draft Released
Several readers submitted the news from CNET's story regarding the Serial ATA 1.0 Draft Released. Looks like the replacement for IDE is getting closer - a peak transfer rate of 150 MBs per second is nice to have under the hood.
Yes - and it is sooo difficult to simply cut your Ribbon cables w/ an Utility knife, twist one end around once or twice, zip it all up with a cable tye or two - and Voila! you have a 'non-air impeding' cable from MoBo to HD. I dont know anyone who clocked their box who hasnt done this... simple and effective. Have a look at the /. article here
I feel sure the manufacturers of the drives will make whatever they think ppl will buy. They don't care so much about other ppls content as long as their drives sell.
We will see non-compliant drives even if this standard is widely accepted (which it won't be) just like dvd makers now seem to "forget" to strictly apply region code checks.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Would someone explain to me how serial is faster than parallel? I mean parallel is just that, sending multiple bits in parallel, serial is sending single bits in series. I would think that sending less information in series would be much slower than sending more in parallel.
What am I missing?
-josh
'course, if they are naming this the way they name current ATA specs... then we might just get 100 MB/s out of it.
--
> In addition, Serial ATA will let each drive communicate directly with the processor. Currently, the different drives must share a common connection.
Finally, a good reason not to have to pay out the wazoo for SCSI, while hopefully doing away with IDE interrupts.
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicacorn
"Old man yells at systemd"
Just out of curiousity...what's to prevent using an encrypted filesystem on one of these (yet-to-be-created) drives?
I mean, if all the drive ever sees is a stream of 3DES bits, how's it supposed to know that there's anything contraband going on to it?
Or would this make encryption an illegal DCMA-circumvention device?
I don't think we need to worry, just yet.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
there is no law _requiring_ copyright control on harddrives, or anywhere
Currently. Willing to bet we are not going to see one in our lifetimes? After DMCA everything is possible.
And it's not like the government has objections to outlawing hardware: e.g. scanners able to listen to cellphone frequencies.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Here's to hoping Firewire wins out this one.
There are already Firewire drives of comparable price to EIDE and of comparable size.
Firewire cards, devices, and OS support already exists.
Firewire is already working over version 2, with plans for version 3, as well as wireless!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It was called Firewire. Apple already makes provisions for in in all their current PCs. You can also buy them at prices and sizes comparable to current IDE drives, so the aren't nearly as expensive or high end as serial ATA. The SATA essentially provides for EIDE what SCSI has had for ages, and what Firewire was built with as well; command queueing, daisy chaining multiple devices, and processor decoupling for the data chain. It's just a simpler design, with less wires. Me, I hope Firewire wins this one.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I've already made two reply posts to others in the thread.
Firewire! Go Firewire!
They are at spec1 in hard disks, notebooks, PCs, cameras, camcorders, and PS2s. Spec2 is already on the way, with designs for spec3, as well as wireless.
It is comparably priced to EIDE at similar sizes, and already has every single benefit that is being touted for SATA, but now and cheaper ^^
SCSI is SCSI, and won't be going away any time soon. But here's to hoping Firewire wins!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I just posted another point somewhere in the threads here (have fun looking) but according to another story I found, the Serial ATA Standard will scale to 600MB/s. SCSI Wasn't always 320MB/s, and IDE wasn't always 100 MB/s. You have to keep in mind this is the first bit of the technology.
Anyone know what Fibre Channel/IEEE 1394 current hard drive standards run at?
Why would there be nothing else in the shops?
How do you thing shops decide what to stock?
How do you think manufacturers know what to make?
Answer: Whatever the customers want to buy because that's the only way they can make money.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
They didn't say that serial ata would be more expensive that scsi, they just suggested that it would be more expensive than ata100. But you're right in a way - how will they get it implemented on high end workstations when SCSI is so much better? Who will they aim the inital tech uptake at? It certainly won't get cheap enough if no-one takes it up. But it's looking like no-one will have a good enough reason to take it up if it can't compete with scsi and raid. What's the deal with serial anyway? I thought parallel was better just on principle?
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Maybe I am picky but what is FireWire's fastest speed? 400 Mbps/50 MBps? The current FibreChannel spec supports much more. The last FibreChannel controller I worked on did around 200 MBps on one loop. FibreChannel can use a hub/switch topology. FC may be a bit storage centric but no more than SCSI is. The only thing I find compelling about FireWire is its price. That is why my main point was that companies should work on making the best technologies less expensive rather than cheaper but lower performing alternatives. In my opinion FireWire and USB are just watered down options. They are cheap but slow. IDE, Serial ports, classic ports, etc. are even cheaper but even slower. How does FireWire not fit into this?
InfiniBand is looking out to be a great replacment for PCI. It gives you the ability to pull the bus out of the box and also uses a hub/switch network like topology. It supports various speeds and a memory model that lends itself to clustering. While InfiniBand is pretty new, the industry is backing it. Intel already has a Target Controllers ready. Host controllers are coming soon.
Combined they give you a lot of flexibility. The Infiniband network for all data traffic and the FibreChannel network for all storage traffic.
-- soldack
If I have these right:
USB maxes out at 1.5 meg a second.
Firewire tops out at 40 meg a second.
SerialATA goes to 150 meg a second.
Parallel ATA (IDE) does 16.7, 33, 66 or 100 meg a second.
SCSI runs 5, 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 meg a second.
Supposedly serial ATA will transparently work with OSs that support parallel ATA. So you can run MS-DOS 5 and Win3.1 on your new 4.3 GHz P5.
What's wrong with SCSI?
Price.
Can this do something that SCSI cannot?
Yes, provide (much) more bang for the buck.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The reason SCSI is so much more expensive than IDE is simply a question of target market.
IDE is targeted to JethroBoBillyBubbaSixPack who is running HoggingDOS98. He is limited by his crappy OS, and a drive that can disconnect from the bus and call back later when it is done with the operation is not going to do him a damn bit of good. He wants big and cheap. Real speed isn't important to him (although he is impressed by high RPM numbers).
SCSI is targeted at folks building servers, high-end workstations, video editing stations, etc. In other words, people who are spending other people's money (for the most part). They know that being able to do a disconnect and free the bus for something else, being able to to scatter/gather and elevator optimatizations, being able to buffer disk I/O properly, and being able to hang many drives off 1 card are more important.
As a result, SCSI is more expensive because people will pay more.
www.eFax.com are spammers
When was the last time you bought a MPAA hard drive?
Read the story. This abomination is pushed by IBM, Toshiba, Matsushita, and Intel. They (maybe not Intel, but it makes the chips) actually do make drives.
Besides, the way to market it will be: "Our new drives do all old drives could, *plus* they allow you to buy songs/videos/etc. off the Internet!"
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Serial ATA is old news. BTW, if you were wondering, it looks like Linux will have support for Serial ATA. Andre Hedrick, one of the "senior" kernel developers, is a member of the Serial ATA working group.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
These greedy f*ckers don't want to accept that inevitably, information (state secrets, corporate skulldugery, music, movies, software, games) will be free. It's an erosive force, just like water. In the internet age, once one person knows how to break a lock, everyone can know it.
You know, its people like you who are usually the first to complain though when some corporation wants to sell your personal data or medical information or something.... ironic, isn't it?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Not quite. USB1 is 1.5MBps and Firewire (1394a) is 50MBps. Newly arrived USB2 can do 60MBps, and IEEE-1394b starts at 100MBps and will go up to 400MBps in a couple years.
And of course, 1394 supports up to 63 devices per bus, hot-swappable, networkable, yadda yadda yadda. But my favorite Firewire trick (target disk mode) is Mac only. Let's see IDE match that.
And it takes only about 3-4 wires to use it, rather than the 50-odd wires you find in SCSI and IDE cables. THAT is a pretty big deal; that simplifies the building and layout of systems.
The really cool part would be to stick a whole lot of Serial-ATA interfaces onto a system; while it would be ludicrous to try to connect 6 SCSI cards to a PCI bus, as the attendant cabling for the potential 90 SCSI drives would be be frightening, and result in a system shaped like the star required to get those cables to go in 6 different directions, the simpler cabling of Serial-ATA might allow such a design to be much cleaner. :-).
It's certainly not as nice as the latest and fanciest SCSI standard, but if it makes plugging in an extra few drives a cheap and simple matter, that will suffice. SCSI is neither simple nor cheap.
(Note: The only SCSI variation that I don't have drives for, at this point, is the latest 80MB thing that just doubled "Ultra-Wide" bandwidth again.)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What the hell do I care? Y'know how expensive this will be? For the home user it'll be quite some time before they'll be able to take advantage of this new spec.
Besides, SCSI is still better...
IEEE-1394b (note the 'b') may well be finalized at their meeting next month. The speeds it will offer are 800mbps, 1600mbps, with extensions to reach 3200mbps, giving you:
:^)
100Meg a second, 200Meg a second, and 400Meg a second. Take *that*, Ultra320 SCSI!
Also note that unlike ATA, SCSI, and SerialATA, FireWire doesn't require a computer - you can hook devices up directly to each other (digital camera to firewire hd, etc.)
And for the overclockers/modders - skinny cables with FireWire, too.
And note to the person who mentioned Apple's FireWire ports on the Mac motherboards - seems Apple has discontinued the internal firewire ports on the latest Macs, from what I hear. Still have the external one(s), though.
Umm, even Slashdot Authors should read the article before posting a First Post! ;p
:p
SATA is software compatible to ATA, which means Every OS that supports ATA has allready SATA support
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Exclusive
Hastening a rapid demise for the free copying of digital media, the next generation of hard disks is likely to come with copyright protection countermeasures built in.
Technical committees of NCTIS, the ANSI-blessed standards body, have been discussing the incorporation of content protection currently used for removable media into industry-standard ATA drives, using proprietary technology originating from the 4C Entity. They're the people who brought you CSS2: IBM, Toshiba Intel and Matsushita.
Why is a replacement for IDE being designed now? What's wrong with SCSI? Can this do something that SCSI cannot? I recently changed over to SCSI and I couldn't be happier.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
While the website points out that SerialATA is an internal, in-box protocol and that USB-2 and 1394 (Firewire) are primarily for connection of external devices, they never really address the point that both of these other protocols are also available for use in-box. Apple, for example, has provided 1394 connectors on the MLB to allow F/W drives to be installed. Also, both of these protocols are (largely) already established in the marketplace. So what's the big deal ... ??
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Why not make an internal serial SCSI spec with smaller cables?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
hardware geeks and case modders rejoice, as serial ata uses a skinny litle cable, much like the audio out cable from your cd-rom to your sound card. makes the case a lot neater (imagine hiding the cables by taping them to the sides of the case!) and increases airflow. check out yummy pictures at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1174.
complex
Hmm as I suspected this is slower than SCSI and so, given that technology's increasing affordability, rather begs the question: Why are they developing it?
Is SCSI really becoming increasingly affordable? I'm talking from a position of ignorance here, but I remember that when I shifted from Amiga to PC/Linux (and therefore from SCSI to IDE) about 3-4 years ago, there was only a small premium on the prices of SCSI drives. Now, however, I was just looking at prices the other day (got hold of a Umax scanner which does USB and SCSI, but is only usable under Linux via SCSI.. which made me consider SCSI once more..), and it was horrible!
I recently bought a 30Gb IDE drive for £125 (an IBM deskstar, not some crappy cheap drive) - the cheapest SCSI drive (according to www.pcindex.co.uk, the UK equivalent of pricewatch.com) is £134 - for 4.5Gb!! To get 30Gb would cost me more than £500 - 4x the price of IDE.
Now I loved SCSI all those years I used it on my Amiga, it's clearly a more powerful and flexible technology. But I am 100% positive that it will never, ever again be anywhere near price competitive with IDE. I therefore predict that Serial ATA drives will prove to be far cheaper than SCSI, and be an eminently suitable technology for non-server use.
(addendum: I was just about to post this, and I thought I should check pricewatch.com to see how different the US situation was. 30Gb IDE drives go from around $100 for crappy bands to $130 for IBM. SCSI 36Gb starts at $305. So it's not nearly as bad as the UK, but you're still basically talking double the price)
Have fun!
Psst! Yes, they *really* are out to get you!
I've lost count of the number of UDMA capable machines I've seen running in PIO mode under both Linux and NT. Not only are data-transfer speeds lousy, but CPU utilisation during data-transfer is obscene. Then they wonder why their applications are running slowly.
Clueless MCSEs appear to do this all the time!
Now all the motherboards need is support for more than 4 ide devices. Has anyone seen some of the nice gigabyte boards that are being produced? Its nice to finally have support for more devices. Now if they made these boards to support the new standards, I would be in heaven.
Peak transfer rate for IDE I believe is 100 MBs (ATA 100). SCSI I think is 320 MBs (Ultra 320). With a RAID Array you can do even better. And if I'm wrong on the numbers, I'm sure the Slashdot fanatics will correct me :)
the scsi standard has been around forever. why are they trying to recreate the wheel. sure scsi is expensive, but this ata 1.0 stuff isn't going to be cheap. if as much money, effort, and time had been spent on getting people to use scsi disks as has been spent on ide crap, then the price for scsi devices would be compairable to that of ide.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Microsoft for one, as stated in the article, is seriously opposed to this. So should be any OS or large application vendor, for the reasons described therein. They do have some big clout. :)
;) Without a chipset with these new ATA commands in it, the drives are useless. So here's a weak point.
:) What about downloading stuff off the Net? I'm sure programs will also be used to strip copyright information off a file as well, or some apps will be written to do filecopying by getting around this.
Not all the HD manufacturers are in this little committee, and I'm sure they'll do whatever will make them more money. If this means going against the committee and either persisting with ATA-100 or making their own version, if there is a market for this product, they will do it.
Now this is _very_ important - New standards need new chipsets - the interface for ATA is held on the motherboard. Intel is on this committee, sure, but what about AMD? VIA? Now, they wouldn't want to do something differently from Intel, would they?
I'm sure there'll be workarounds built as quickly as DeCSS was. Cables with de-protection dongles built in? Nice one.
There are more potential problem scenarios for this. If file X is "protected" in this manner, what about X.zip?
(this is a tangent from this - the new ATA standard would be a hardware check on the HD, i know, but from the article i gather it would be effectively on request of the file/application)
In short, I would keep a close eye on it, but I wouldn't worry. If it becomes a reality (as in, a major choice and in stores), tools will be all over Warez sites. Think of the volume of DeCSS out there, now multiply it by the number of Windows users there are - and this would be a hack for something REALLY annoying.
It'll be tried and will fail - there is no law _requiring_ copyright control on harddrives, or anywhere, so the fight will be on, with people boycotting the new drives and sticking with ATA-100 or SCSI-UW, or hacking them. Until the next standard comes along, which won't have this control on it, and will sell like hotcakes.
Get our yer mirror sites.
Fross
Folks,
The reason why Serial ATA is being developed is simple: going to SCSI--especially Ultra2-Wide and Ultra 160--is a VERY expensive option.
Have you seen the cost of Ultra 160 SCSI adapters? Or how much the cabling costs? Or how much Ultra 160-compatible SCSI drives cost? Pretty expensive, and no thanks.
Serial ATA will of course initially cost more than UDMA/100, but it still would be much less expensive to implement than Ultra 160 SCSI. And because Serial ATA does not use those pesky flat ribbon cables, installation is also much less of a hassle, especially now you have much less interference with interior air flow of a system case, which will actually promote longer life of computer components. The best thing is that Serial ATA does not require a drastic change in the operating system to support it out of the box other than getting motherboard chipset drivers for the South Bridge chip that has the Serial ATA support, and given that most motherboard manufacturers include a CD-ROM disk with these drivers as standard....
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
From The Register's story:
.. EVEN LESS! But they were wonderful devices, these floppy disks. We could make as many copies as we wanted as one, and store whatever we wanted! Oh those were the days, when the MP3s flowed free, and the DeCSS rebels weren't laughed at by the public. Yes. Those were the days."
"Where were you when they copy-protected the hardware, Daddy?"
"Well son, way back in the year 2000, we had these wonderful devices called CD Recorders. We could copy almost any CD! Except for evil CDs with defective sectors burn into them, they required a little more work my lad. And we had these great devices called IDE Hard Drives. You could store 80GB of anything you wanted on one of these disks! And copy it to any drive!"
"80GB? You're old dad! How many gigabytes is a terrabyte again? Johnny down the street just got a new Fiber Channel 740TB Drive. Can I get one for the holidays?"
"We'll see, son. I'm liking the looks of the new nanodrives. But anyhow, continuing my story. We had all sorts of magical hardware. We had Orb Disks, which held 2.2 GB! And these things called zip disks, which held 250 or 100MB!"
"100MB?! Ha ha dad. I can't even fit a Word 2044 Document on that!"
"You think 100MB is small? Wayyy back in the day we had things called FLOPPY DISKS. And they only held 1.44MB, 720K, 360K, or
Why can't these companies concentrate on making the good technologies out there cheaper? Enough of these watered down attempts like USB and FireWire. Enough with PCI and PCI-X. We know we have things that are better. I am so tired of good hardware costing so much more just because the vendors can get away with charging more. They claim you are paying for performance, development costs, etc. but I think you are paying for a lack of real competition. All these companies that make SCSI drives yet prices in this market didn't fall like the IDE market? Does it really cost that much more to build a scsi drive than an IDE one? What about a fibre channel controller and drives vs. similar SCSI controller and drives? It is unbelievable!
By the by...although InfiniBand is pretty new it has great potential. It makes a great platform for both storage and network traffic. I am currently working on drivers for storage (fc) and network (GB ethernet) devices over InfiniBand. And our first target platform is...Linux!
-- soldack