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Serial ATA Coming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the gimme-my-bits-and-be-quick-about-it dept.

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.

8 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. too late, unless its way cheap by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    there's already a high speed serial that can be used for ide drives. its called usb2 and also firewire.

    I am using an external drive bay that takes FW in and converts (with a very small pcb) to 40pin ide (ata100). cost isn't much ($70) and the controller isn't either ($30).

    I was able to copy an 80gig drive from native ide to a remote ide via firewire on the latest linux 2.4.18 kernel in about 3 hrs or less.

    serial ide would probably JUST be ide. but serial usb2 and FW are more general purpose (video, etc).

    I think serial ide is just too late in the market.

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    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  2. Sooner than I think? by Brento · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's a matter of opinion. Remember, this requires new hard drives - something that doesn't exactly happen every day in big business. You're talking new hard drive duplicators, external hard drive enclosures, etc. This is like saying fibre channel hard drives are available today - well, sure they are, but they aren't getting big play in your typical home or business.

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    What's your damage, Heather?
  3. SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced by spullara · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are a number of issues that it seems that SerialATA doesn't address that it should:

    1) Power to the device is still separated from the data connection.
    2) Because it is backwards compatible with regular ATA it appears it will have the same limitations on the number of devices you can connect, i.e. 2 per channel.
    3) It is unusable for external devices.

    Why upgrade to a standard whose only advantage is a speed increase we don't need and smaller cables that can be done with parallel ATA ala "round" IDE cables? Seems like a huge investment that would be better made in FireWire 2.0 or something similar so that you can use the same interface internally and externally, with power provided, and have many devices on the same bus.

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    "If I can see farther it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." -- Murray Gell-Mann
  4. Three paragraphs per page??? by Mr.+Neutron · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I understand the need to maximize ad revenue, but this Heatseekerz.net is absurd! Perhaps someone can post a link about Serial ATA where we can read more than six words between page loads.

    As far as the name "Serial ATA," it's a smart move. It will create the impression in people's mind that it's an "extention" or "enhancement" of standard ATA, without necessarily being backwards compatible at all. But, hey, once it gains market share, and the SATA drives start filling the shelves at Best Buy, it won't really matter.

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    dinner: it's what's for beer
  5. Re:Serial ATA could REALLY cut into SCSI sales by paulbd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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. this is an OS design issue. you don't have to do this with Linux. there is a single SCSI driver, based on the identity of your SCSI controller. All other SCSI devices attached to the bus are accessed using this driver. this has never really been true under Windows or MacOS, but it has nothing to do with SCSI itself, just the rather silly way developers of and for those platforms have gone about creating the driver architecture.

  6. Serial SCSI replacement? by jonr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wasn't IBM developing serial standard decade ago? Whatever happened to that? (I think it was called SSA or Fibre-Channel)

  7. Re:FAQ from the SerialATA.org website by Tet · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Serial ATA is an evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA is scalable and will allow future enhancements to the computing platform.

    Questions not answered by the FAQ:

    • Why the arbitrary distinction between internally and externally connected devices. Why target one and not the other? SCSI works fine for both, why not design SerialATA to do the same?
    • Will I still be able to use a serial ATA device 10 years from now? I can (and do) use 10 year old SCSI devices. Will the SerialATA consortium guarantee backward compatibility, or is this yet another lock in to a perpetual upgrade cycle?
    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  8. Re:Why is serial ATA faster? by jyak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Parallel ATA cannot scale to support several more speed doublings, and is nearing its
    performance capacity. By contrast, Serial ATA's roadmap starts at 1.5 gigabits per second
    (equivalent to a data rate of 150 MB/s) and migrates to 3.0 gigabits per second (300 MB/s), then
    to 6.0 gigabits per second (600 MB/s). This roadmap supports up to 10 years of storage
    evolution, based on historical trends.