Serial ATA Coming

John Doe writes "Heatseekerz.net Has a new article dedicated to Serial ATA @ Cebit 2002. This technology will be here sooner then you think!" The article is a little thin, but I haven't heard a lot about what looks to be a very common standard in the not so distant future.

Comments

Serial ATA could REALLY cut into SCSI sales

[MtViewGuy]

I think if you're willing to live with the four-device limitation of Serial ATA, the new standard will have a number of great benefits.

First, Serial ATA will offer a major leap up in terms of transfer speeds. The initial speeds will be equivalent of ATA-150, but we will eventually see the equivalent of ATA-300 and ATA-600 speeds, which far surpasses even the current Ultra-Wide SCSI 160 standard. I'm sure companies like Promise are working on RAID controllers for Serial ATA that will allow an even bigger leap up in hard disk performance.

Second, because Serial ATA has finally dispensed with using a ribbon cable, this means way less clutter inside the computer and could also mean system cases can be designed for more efficient air cooling.

Third, Serial ATA--unlike SCSI--doesn't require you to load device drivers out of the wazoo to support devices on the bus. The only driver you'll probably need is the driver for the motherboard chipset that incorporates Serial ATA support.

I mean, let's face it--SCSI is still pretty expensive due to the cost of host adapters, cabling and SCSI peripherals. SCSI is only really useful where lots of SCSI device access (for example, hard disks) is required, primarily in server environments. For workstation and home computer use, Serial ATA offer most of the high-speed disk access of SCSI, but at a much lower cost.

In short, SCSI will become increasingly a niche product. And SCSI may eventually get competition from the high end of mass storage interfaces as the cost of Fibre Channel devices drops.

Serial ATA and MS

[Sri Lumpa]

In another related new, a MS spokesman said Serial ATA is so good that it shouldn't be restricted only to interfaces inside the PC and that MS was planning to improve on it to form a network-centric (a la firewire(TM)) Serial ATA specification, for now dubbed SATAN. The beast is scheduled to be unleashed soon upon the world.

A linux evangelist said inresponse to Microsofts project "Repent now and see the light before it is too late for your soul".