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ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived
Spot writes "If you're a hardware junkie, then you may already know ATA133 is on it's way to becoming the new standard for drive controllers. LittleWhiteDog has a very detailed look into the Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller and Maxtor's D740X-6L ATA133 interface drive. " And I just bought a few 100g drives :) I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.
Still rules for now, when will serial ATA will come out for the consumer market? seemed like a slick deal for me. As for ATA 133, it's just a holding tech until Serial ATA comes out (god knows when)
kawai
How is the linux support for ata133 interfaces??
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
http://saveie6.com/
But they aren't doing anything to make it SUCK LESS. Drive platters aren't getting faster at the rate the controller is. Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.
Now that IDE has for all intents and purposes killed SCSI on the desktop, you'd think that they'd expend a little fucking engineering effort to make it so that you can control more than two drives on a controller, and so that a other devices on the chain can work while one is processing a command.
I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.
Given the current speed of IDE hard drivers - ATA 66 is overkill let alone ATA 133. Hell, ATA 33 is overkill for all but the fastest drives out there. The only benifit you will see, is that the drives onboard RAM-chip cache can be accesses quicker, and that moving from an older IDE spec will get you the new fangled sheiled cables that may help with reliability.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
And I just bought a few 100g drives
Maybe they will give consumers a bulk discount when buying by the kilo.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
When was the last time you saw a 10,000RPM IDE drive? As far as an *interface*, IDE is fine and the slight advantages of SCSI don't justify the cost. However, purely due to the drive manufacturers stuborness, you can not find anything faster than 7200RPM in an IDE drive. While the fastest IDE drives are *VERY* competitive with SCSI performance, SCSI still has the top drives. Nothing touches the Seagate X15-36LP, and the "cheap" ($200) maxtor 10k III is still faster than anything available in IDE.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Seems that IDE/EIDE drives are the choice for cheap and large. I'm certainly guilty of buying a few. However, I am wondering why fibre channel and SCSI aren't more popular for the desktop?
/. a few months ago about an interface gadget that let's you chain them with CAT-5 ethernet cable. That would rock!
For application installs and OS install/cache, a 10,000 rpm LVD Ultra160 is hardly fast enough for me. Also, I have 9 drives on this system. I can only do 4 with IDE, and if I put in a second controller, I blow another IRQ (of which there are only 10 available of 16 - sad commentary on PC architecture). Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.
Allow me to extoll the virtues of SCSI/LVD:
-15 drives/devices per IRQ
-Lightning fast.. 320 mbyte/sec now
-Doesn't slow down your CPU when moving or copying files from one drive to another
-The above applies to burning CDs as well (a major bonus)
Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?
And what about fiber channel? Seems there was a story on
Why is everyone buying IDE? Or are they? Just curious.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Maxtor's press release from Oct.29 is here, and contains this piece of info:
:)
Ultra133 TX2 increases data transfer rates between a hard disk drive and a personal computer up to 33 percent compared with Ultra ATA/100 controllers [...]
Duh. I suppose maxtor's 160Gb drive increases hard drive capacity with... well... up to 60% compared to 100Gb hard drives also.
I'm not going to argue with any of your points, but I still disagree. SCSI is still faster than IDE and most people tend to agree that SCSI components are better engineered. SCSI is a stable standard that is probbaly going to be around for a while. Linux wise, you don't have to bother messing with emulation and the possible IRQ nightmare. I don't see why there won't be a mixture of standards. IDE/ATAPI for joe consumer, SCSI for us discrimating desktop/server buyers, and FC for people who have too much money and like buzzwords.
Has anyone actually benchmarked FC and the latest SCSI drives? I'm curious as to the differences.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Ultra 100 controllers are typically moving data at less than 1/3 of their rated capacity from almost any modern ATAPI drive. As the article says: In the speed arena, the added bandwidth an ATA133 compatible controller can give you is unfortunately not a selling point at this time. I always get a kick out of people replacing their Ultra 66 controller with an Ultra 100. They are invariably disappointed by the almost identical performance. Now everyone with Ultra 100 controllers can rush out and buy Ultra 133 controllers and experience that same disappointment all over again.
What Ultra 133 buys us is the ability to use drives in excess of 137GB. Suddenly, 160MB drives are showing up that use this new standard. And that's a lot of p0rn!
Now what I want is a drive standard that can support high speed, multiple drives (not just two) per channel, is low cost, and uses a better, more convenient, round cabling system (e.g. fiber, coax, etc.).
-henrik
The ATA/ATAPI-6 specification has support for command queueing, which is the asynchronous component of SCSI. SCSI also implements out-of-order data transfers within a command, which is not part of the ATA spec, however this doesn't help quite as much as command reordering in the queued world.
In the queued-ATA design, the command phase consists of writing all the same task-file registers as before. However, instead of a data transfer phase, an ATA-6 drive has the option to disconnect from the bus and report a 0x40 status instead of 0x50, indicating it is working on a queued command. At this point in time, up to 31 other commands may be issued while the drive is working on the first command.
Once the drive has the data for any of these commands, it then enables the service request bit, at which point the host is expected to issue the service command. The drive, upon receiving a service command, puts the tag that the drive is servicing into the task file and begins data transfer for that command.
To my knowledge, this is pretty similar to how SCSI drives implement this, the difference being that in ATA land the drive must complete the data transfer for a single command while in SCSI land, the drives can disconnect in the middle of a transfer and resume that transfer later after servicing other commands.
Media rates on most drives are in the 50-70MB/s range, so the other poster saying that it only affects performance out of cache is mostly correct. The only difference here at Maxtor for the 133 vs 100 is basically a few timing changes in our ASIC.
More data, damnit!
You can get information on Serial ATA at serialata.org. You will find that these new ATA controllers break the 4 drive limitation, and have a very small cable, as opposed to the air-flow-blocking current ATA cables.
Another mini-rant I have to get out of the way, is about the psychotic SCSI user blaming ATA for keeping SCSI from becoming a real force in desktop computing.
Guess what, if the SCSI manufacturers would have brought the price down to reasonable levels, this would not have happened. Is SCSI better? In servers, heck yes. On the desktop? No, not really. Even on small servers, the advantages do not outweigh the extra cost of SCSI. The folks in the SCSI industry made a concious decision to stay in the server. Price DOES matter on desktops, and there is NO technology that can beat ATA for price/performance. Thats what ATA is for. Bleating that its' "technically inferior to SCSI" is stupid. They are not intened to do the same things. SCSI=Server Fibre Channel=Server ATA/Serial ATA=Desktop
I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G.
This is very similar to the old maxim that the computer you really want is always $5000. Only now, for that money you get a 21" flat panel display, multiple GIGAhertz and more RAM than you can shake a stick at.
Supposed to ship today, THAT'S the baby, raid-5 with 48bits LBA support. That means 960GB (6x160Gig using maxtor 160GB drives) of storage for dirt cheap, plus Raid-5 support.
:)
I am planning a non-critical datacenter (rendered frames and so on) with that setup, it's crazy, while a single drive is not offering the performance of the barracuda 180GB 7200rpm drive from seagate, it's like C$500 for a 160GB drive whereas the seagate would cost me around C$2500, you can get to the same performance (plus increased storage and safety with Raid 1 or 5) for the same price than a single seagate drive. it ROCKS.
I can't beleive I payed C$300 for a 40MB on my amiga1200 not even 10 years ago
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
From the article: "The TX2 is the first Ultra ATA133 controller card that has support for 66MHz PCI motherboards (32-bit @ 66MHz as opposed to the current 32-bit @ 33MHz - not the same as 64-bit @ 33MHz). Granted there are no 32-bit 66MHz PCI motherboards available at this point in time (they'll be here "when they're done") but when they are available this card will be able to take advantage of the extra hertz."
It seems that we have two competing PCI slot standards - 64-bit/33MHz and 32-bit/66MHz. I assume that eventually we will see 64-bit/66MHz.
I remember an article from a few years ago talking about what the next step in PCI slots would be, and it spoke to these two steps. The argument against 64-bit slots was that it would have to change the physical dimensions of the slot to accomodate the additional bits being passed. The problem with 66MHz slots was cross-talk and RF interference between two adjacent slots.
Since these new ATA/133 cards are backwards compatible with 33MHz slots, I must assume they found a way to reduce RF interference. The existence of 64-bit PCI slots means that industry has found a way to move 64-bits using the older physical architecture.
That said, which of the standards do Slashdot readers think will catch on? Or will the two compete until a 64-bit/66Mhz standard is agreed upon?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I can answer two of your questions.....
With new processors, how much are you REALLY giving up in processor useage? This was only a problem on Pentium and 486 processors.
On the Fibre Channel front, FC is used for external disks. FC has a maximum distance of, someone correct me if I misremember, 2 kilometers, on optical fiber. The controllers are very expensive. The drives are expensive. The entire point of FC was to get over the 15 drive limit of SCSI and to get over the distance limitations of SCSI (3 meters) and Diff. SCSI (15 meters).
I am not aware of any internal FC implementations on standard server hardware, but as a rule, its an external JBOD application.
Check out storagereview's latest review of 20 drives. Given 10,000 i/o operations per second, all SCSI drives used ~20 percent CPU, while all IDE drives used ~40 percent CPU. The CPU was an Intel Pentium 4 2GHz.
Looking at the specs on the linked article:
New Ultra ATA interface with Maxtor-patented Ultra ATA/133 protocol supporting burst data transfer rates of 133MB/s.
Maxtor-patented? I hope this is a typo or editing mistake. Looking around at http://www.uspto.gov/ doesn't reveal much, but Googling for information brings up a few press releases saying things such as "Ultra ATA/133 Is Based on Maxtor Patented ATA Technology" and "The Fast Drives specification and licensing rights for Ultra ATA/133 are available from Maxtor under non-disclosure."
Are other ATA standards patented like this, by Maxtor or other companies like Western Digital or Seagate?
Ian
Todays huge harddisks don't make me store more pr0n on them. They let me store the same amount of pr0n but in much better quality! :)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.
first, boot the linux kernel with the IDE-Bus set to 66 (set the idebus=66 option), if your motherboard and drive controller supports it.
ATA/66, Non-CD, has DMA support:
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -X66 -c1 -u1 /dev/hda
Older drives, not ATA/66, but with DMA support:
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -X34 -c1 -u1 /dev/hda
The burner doesn't support DMA:
/sbin/hdparm -d0 -c1 -u1 /dev/hdc
man hdparm for more info.
If you want hotswap you have to get a controller that supports it. 3ware has the Escalade IDE RAID boards that support hot swap. Some people have said that 3ware is no longer going to be selling these boards but I think 3ware is merely idiotic by not including the details they used to on their product page. You can buy there controllers at a number of places including: http://www.hypermicro.com/store/index.htm
See StorageReview.com for more information. Adaptec's IDE RAID board probably supports hotswap too but it is a bit more pricey. If 3ware continues to be idiotic Adaptec might be a better choice...
- 800,000 hours mean time between failure (MTBF) in the field
- 3 Year Limited Warranty
units 800000hours years* 91.263642
If their drives have a 91 year mean time to faulure, it would be pretty cheap for them to give a 5 year warranty rather than a 3 year warranty. Even if their MTBF was off by an order of magnitude , a 5 year warranty wouldn't be that bad.
I think it's time for someone to compile some failure stats on these things.
(anecdote)
Back in the early '80s when oil sands development was starting in Northern Alberta, a friend of mine was working at the site. It was mid-winter, and starting to get pretty cold... -35C (~-30F)
-30 is cold on any scale, but the equipment that they were using was rated doen wo -40. Now in the States, +40C ~ -40C is often referred to as "Mil Spec". In Northern Alberta it's referred to as "outdoor equipment".
-35C, and this equipment freezes. My friend Dan calls the manufacturer of this stuff and he complains about it. The engineer led off with one question that told Dan all he needed to know.
With a Texan drawl he asked, incredulously: "You mean it actually gets that cold?"
I'm wondering if Maxtor's 800K Hour MTBF is kinda like that Texan Mil Spec rating.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.