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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.
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.
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
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)
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
Serial is faster than parallel because they can crank the clock speed way, way up on the bus. You can't do that with parallel because you end up having major problems keeping all the data pulses properly synchronized. Also, with more signal cables you need more grounding cables - that's why the Ultra 66 and 100 drives need 80-wire cables to work properly. And even then, the ATA-100 stuff only really goes that fast if everything is just right and the moon is in the right phase (or so I understand.)
Serial cables are just much simpler electrically, even though the clock speed has to be 16 times higher for the same bandwidth.
Disclaimer. I am not an electrical engineer. I just read stuff off web sites.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
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