Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Serial ATA vs. SCSI - Will it Compete?

Posted by Cliff on from the technical-musings-abound dept.

fazzumar asks: "I've been checking out serial ATA (SATA) and it seems like it's got a lot of potential. The first generation spec was finalized August 2001 and members of the SATA group anticipate a 12-18 month acceptance period. They've planned for a cut-over phase and adapters that allow connecting SATA devices to ATA adapters and vice versa. The cables alone are a worthwhile advantage (4 pins, up to 1 meter in length), and the 150MB/sec bandwidth is a (minor) improvement over current ATA drives & adapters. Infoworld has a story on SATA that provides a few tidbits of information. What I really want to know is, will manufacturers of the new host adapters be able to integrate many of the advantages that SCSI provides or will the cost of adding these features push the retail cost too high for the anticipated market?" I just picked up a new WD Hard drive just yesterday for the planned MP3 jukebox I hope to be building near the end of the summer. I really wanted to go SCSI, but couldn't. While the poster claims a near ~7x in price difference, I saw about a ~5x difference in my local store. Is SCSI in danger of falling behind IDE drives (especially serial IDE drives) in popularity?

"I love SCSI, and I can bring myself to accept the additional cost of the controller, but with IDE hard drive prices dropping, I frequently wonder if SCSI drive prices are artificially inflated. Just a few years ago, SCSI drives were ~10-20% more than IDE and now they're ~7X more than an IDE drive. (Seagate 10k RPM SCSI - ~18 gig for ~175. Western Digital 7200 RPM IDE - ~120 gig for ~175) If the option comes out to get SCSI performance from an IDE drive I'm going to take it."

48 comments

  1. Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by reaper20 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I frequently wonder if SCSI drive prices are artificially inflated.

    Hell yes - There's no way they aren't. I'm sick of this price barrier myself.

    Look at a SCSI drive and an IDE drive. Sure, there are some differences, MTBF, blah blah ... but generally speaking, they're the same thing. There are certainly not enough differences to justify the price. Is there some magic spell they cast on SCSI drives that quadruples the price? SCSI's "enterprise capabilities" make using SCSI on the desktop really expensive, so they continue to gouge us.

    What do we get in return, Technology that Should Not Exist(tm) - Things like IDE RAID.

    Sucks being a SCSI zealot. :(

    1. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by Rolo+Tomasi · · Score: 0, Troll
      You've got to face it, SCSI is almost dead. SCSI harddrives aren't (much) faster than their ATA counterparts (the high-RPM SCSI drives have a lower latency, but this is insignificant for most applications), they are not more reliable (on the contrary), and they cost ten times as much. Other than harddrives, new SCSI products aren't being designed (apart from niche products maybe). The only real advantage of SCSI, being able to attach many harddrives to achieve high transfer rates, is gone with the advent of cheap professional ATA-RAID controllers like the Adaptec 2400. And Serial ATA will do dismiss the last remaining practical flaw of ATA, the cabling.

      Kludgy systems persist, while the intelligent designs die. Betamax anyone? How many of you drive a car with a Wankel engine? This is the sorry fate of humanity.

      --
      Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
    2. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by mosch · · Score: 2
      How many of you drive a car with a Wankel engine? This is the sorry fate of humanity.
      If it wasn't for slashdot, I'd never get to see the failure of the rotary engine described as a bellweather signaling the collapse of humanity. Thank you!
    3. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by mosch · · Score: 4, Informative
      I mean you no disrespect, but you're an idiot.

      Hard drives prices are set by a complicated formula where somebody sits down, looks at the costs involved in developing the drive, the costs involved in testing the drive, the costs involved with creating the equipment to manufacturer the drive, the number of units they expect to sell, the expected return rate and the cost per unit of manufacture (and a lot of other things). They then attempt to set a price which will result in a reasonable profit.

      Why attempt to set a price which results in reasonable profit? Because if one aims for an unreasonable per-unit profit, a competitor (and the hard-drive market is hardly a monopoly) will decide that they can sell enough extra units by lowering their price that they'll undercut the first vendor.

      So SCSI drives happen to be the most expensive in nearly every fashion. They're the most likely to implement cutting edge technologies, thereby funding the refinement of these technologies for later use in cheap IDE drives. 15K RPM SCSI drives have been around for quite some time now, but I'm not aware of any IDE drives that beat 10K RPM yet.

      SCSI sells fewer units, thus the fixed costs are distributed over a much, much smaller number of units, driving up the price dramatically.

      SCSI drives are more likely to be returned as defective. Not because of a higher failure rate, but because SCSI drives are likely to be put places where they get used heavily, 24 hours a day. IDE drives tend to get used in applications which involve idling 98% of the time, so even cheap shit will have low return rates.

      Additionally, the SCSI command set is larger than the ATAPI command set. In fact, ATAPI is just a standard way to communicate a subset of SCSI over an IDE connection. This means that SCSI drives really can do more things than an IDE drive... for instance, they can accept multiple commands, then execute them in a more intelligent manner than an IDE drive, which only knows how to do one thing at a time (IBM DTLA and DPTA not withstanding)... So this SCSI drive is also more complicated than the IDE counterpart, thus requiring more testing, and more design, raising the costs further.

      Saying that SCSI is artificially overpriced is like claiming a WRC rally car is artificially overpriced, because you managed to get 500hp out of your Dodge Neon by bolting on a turbo, intercooler, straight pipes and a cold air intake.

      Somehow I think that my explanation for the price disparity between IDE and SCSI is a lot more plausible than one which requires every single hard-drive manufacturer on the planet to be organized in a cabal, whose sole purpose is to drive up the price of server-class hardware.

    4. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by HalfFlat · · Score: 2

      Somehow I think that my explanation for the price disparity between IDE and SCSI is a lot more plausible than one which requires every single hard-drive manufacturer on the planet to be organized in a cabal, whose sole purpose is to drive up the price of server-class hardware.
      Have you looked at the tape-drive/media market recently? My money's on the cabal.
    5. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by mosch · · Score: 1, Flamebait
      Have you looked at the tape-drive/media market recently? My money's on the cabal.
      fucking retard.
    6. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by scotch · · Score: 2
      When the new Maxda RX-8 comes out next year, you can bet I'll be driving the rotary engine (again).

      --
      XML causes global warming.
    7. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by HalfFlat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's one hell of a rejoinder to a throw-away comment.

      More specifically: there are much larger margins on server-targeted hardware, such as tape drives, than there is in the desktop arena. While 5-10% margins are common at the retail level for consumer hardware, tape systems seem to start at 20% and go up from there.

      Even acknowledging the fact that these are mechanical devices and so will naturally not benefit so greatly from the price drops in other computer hardware, tape backup prices have barely fallen at all in the last 4 years. As higher capacities and speeds are introduced, they just come out at higher and higher pricepoints.

      There doesn't need to be an organised cabal - when you have a market which is willing to pay these prices, and where there are often established long-term relationships between the buyers and vendors, it's unsurprising that there hasn't been the same downward pressure on prices. Unlike in consumer hardware, where there is typically little brand loyalty and price-competition is fierce.

      Final concrete example: getting SCSI hardware in an external enclosure typically costs about 12% more than when it is bare. At the cheap end, it's about what you'd expect to pay for a decent enclosure. At the expensive end, it's about 3 or 4 times the retail cost of a similar enclosure. Where's the competition driving prices down here?

      Oh, and don't be so quick to call people retards. It's rude on a number of levels.

    8. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      YHBT. etc. etc.

    9. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Additionally, the SCSI command set is larger than the ATAPI command set. In fact, ATAPI is just a standard way to communicate a subset of SCSI over an IDE connection.


      This is a nit, but honestly, while the SCSI command set is larger and allows for precise, intelligent control, SCSI peripheral logic is much less complex than drive logic on a comparable IDE drive. The reason is that SCSI intelligence is all centralized at the host adapter, whereas with IDE the controller intelligence is integrated on the drive's control board. Take a look at a modern SCSI drive board sometime -- there will be nothing but a single ASIC and some memory, where ATA drives frequently still have multiple asics and some glue logic.

      Most SCSI overhead comes from sending commands across the SCSI bus that would have been simply communicated between components on an IDE drive's PCB. The tradeoff is that with SCSI you have one central brain (the HA) firing off orders; whereas with IDE, each drive has a brain, and doesn't have any mechanism for knowing what the "other" brains that it's sharing a bus with are doing at any given time. This is the cause of ATA's inefficiencies and design/implementation limitations.

      This is apparent if you examine performance comparisons -- ATA drives are much more efficient at raw, single-task throughput, due to having virtually zero bus overhead; but the intelligence of SCSI will win in situations where the storage network must walk and chew gum simultaneously, and where raw throughput means less than end-to-end latency. Whether performance in these applications means enough to you to spend the extra $BIG_NUM on SCSI, is a decision that must be made on an individual application basis.
    10. Re:Damn hard drive mannufacurers..... by bhima · · Score: 1

      I've had both a RX3sp & a Cosmo! Wankels are great engines, we just need some andvances in material sciences for the apex seals. Now what does the have to do with hard drives?

      --
      Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  2. Apple seems to think ATA is better... by knabar · · Score: 2, Informative
    Apple uses ATA in its new Xserve rackmount server. (See here and here)

    Quote: The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.

    1. Re:Apple seems to think ATA is better... by DietFluffy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Apple uses ATA in its new Xserve rackmount server.

      Jobs also said Apple is "humble" as it enters the [server] market. "For everything we know, there are 10 things we don't know," he said.

      Perhaps he was referring to the use of ATA instead of SCSI for a "serious" server? *grin*

    2. Re:Apple seems to think ATA is better... by adcm · · Score: 1

      Apple's server are targetting a specific market, they're using what amounts to a trick (that is using lots of (IDE channels) to acheive greater performance. While it works in this particular instance, it is not necessarily effective in every area. The XServe (even with the XServe RAID) is hardly suited for an enterprise data storage center,

      Designing a system involves considerable trade-offs, Apple just chose a certain set of features balanced for a particular market.

  3. ATA becomes more popular than scsi by DietFluffy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is SCSI in danger of falling behind IDE drives (especially serial IDE drives) in popularity?

    In other news, Microsoft Windows takes a majority of the desktop operating system market.

    1. Re:ATA becomes more popular than scsi by tenman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The major difference is Queuing and Parallel Processing. Even today's IDE RAID controllers can't get more than one instruction down the pipe at the same time, and queuing is non-existent. Recently I have seen IDE cards that support extra RAM, but specs on the boxes don't read like they support queues. SATA will introduce the concept of a queue, and that will speed I/O greatly, but the biggest speed barrier is the speed at which the instructions are sent to the disk.
      I run a small video editing shop. Real time video editing taxes disk I/O on PC's more than anything else I know of. I HAVE to run SCSI, and still, even with SCSI, I have to wait. Most of the time I am waiting on the I/O.
      That being said, after reading the SATA standards, I will feel safe replacing more than half of my high-speed I/O channels with it. I am willing to have it manage everything except the most extensive reads and writes. I will soon be dedicating a portion of my web site to the explanation of SCSI vs. SATA. Bookmark it now.

    2. Re:ATA becomes more popular than scsi by honold · · Score: 0, Interesting

      tagged queueing has been in ide drives for many, many years now

    3. Re:ATA becomes more popular than scsi by juventasone · · Score: 1
      Good post, but I'd like to challenge it. You say you "have" to run SCSI for DV editing?

      StorageReview's "High-End Drive Mark 2002" uses "Content Creation Winstone 2001" to gather performance information from programs like Premiere, Photoshop, and Soundforge. Details here.

      If you view the ranking for the High-End benchmark, which uses the same testbed, you'll see that the Western Digital WD1200JB (an ATA drive) out-performs 10 current families of SCSI drives (ranging for 7200 to 10000 rpm), leaving only 3 drives above it (one 10000, and two 15000).

      So, are you using one of those three drives? If not, it appears your pricey "must need" SCSI solution is currently bested by a lowly ATA drive.

  4. scsi performance in an ide drive by DietFluffy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the option comes out to get SCSI performance from an IDE drive I'm going to take it."

    Review of the Western Digital 1200JB (The 8MB Cache Special Edition.)

    With desktop performance and capacity vastly superior to the competition as well as a surprisingly low operating temperature, the Caviar WD1200JB reaffirms Western Digital's preeminence in the IDE desktop performance segment. In fact, for desktop usage, the JB bests all 10k RPM drives save only Maxtor's Atlas 10k III.

    Once again we're obligated to point out an interesting fact. The hardware enthusiast market, comprising a significant portion of StorageReview.com's readership, has always pledged it would respond enthusiastically to the world's first 10,000 RPM drive. These folks want the performance of a 10k RPM SCSI drive without the SCSI premium. The WD1200JB, like the WD1000BB-SE, delivers the desktop performance of a good 10k RPM drive according to tests constructed from real-world, high-level applications. If you want SCSI's performance without its price or capacity limits, the WD1200JB is the drive for you.

    1. Re:scsi performance in an ide drive by nosferatu-man · · Score: 2

      I have two. They're hellaciously fast, to say nothing of MUCH quieter and cooler running than a 10k SCSI, let alone a 15k.

      'jfb

      --
      To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
    2. Re:scsi performance in an ide drive by mosch · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Interesting portion of the article to quote. Odd that you didn't mention that the Maxtor Atlas 10k III (a U160 SCSI drive) beats the WD1200JB by:
      • 88% in the SR File Server DriveMark 2002
      • 85% in the SR Web Server DriveMark 2002
      • 43% lower average read service time
      • 39% lower average write service time
      • 20% in the Business Disk WinMark 99
      • 16% in the SR Gaming DriveMark 2002
      • 13% higher transfer rate beginning
      • 10% in the SR Office DriveMark 2002
      • 8% higher transfer rate ending
      • 2% In the High-End Disk WinMark 99
      • 1% In the SR High-End DriveMark 2002
      • 0% (a tie) in the SR Bootup DriveMark 2002
      In fact, there's no performance test where the IDE drive in question beat the SCSI drive in question at all. Next time you make an argument, you should really cite a source that supports your argument, on the off chance that somebody reads it.
    3. Re:scsi performance in an ide drive by DietFluffy · · Score: 1

      Interesting portion of the article to quote. Odd that you didn't mention that the Maxtor Atlas 10k III (a U160 SCSI drive) beats the WD1200JB...

      I don't know how you got modded to +3. If you had bothered to read my post before flaming me, you would have seen that I actually put in BOLD the part that says the atlas 10k III beats the 1200jb.

      In fact, there's no performance test where the IDE drive in question beat the SCSI drive in question at all. Next time you make an argument, you should really cite a source that supports your argument, on the off chance that somebody reads it.

      Again, nothing I quoted implied that the IDE drive in question would beat the SCSI drive in question. As reflected in the quotes I selected, I have no doubt that the atlas 10k III performs better than the 1200jb.

      Please don't flame me without first actually reading my post. It's hard to believe that someone can find fault in a post that includes only a link and quotes from an article.

  5. Use the high-speed link for networking by billcopc · · Score: 1

    Why won't we be seeing this technology used for conventional TCP/IP networks ? Because the acronym for Serial-ATA Network is SATAN! Har dee har har.

    Seriously, why not ? I don't know squat about this new standard but if they can zip bits from a hard drive to a cpu, why couldn't they zip them between two cpus instead ?

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
    1. Re:Use the high-speed link for networking by randombit · · Score: 1

      I don't know squat about this new standard but if they can zip bits from a hard drive to a cpu, why couldn't they zip them between two cpus instead?

      Presumably there are length limitations on the cable. For example, ATA-133 can only go up to about 18 inches, I think, before crosstalk becomes so bad that you loose performance and/or stability. Because Serial ATA is, as the name suggests, a serial bus (or at least a mostly serial bus; I think it might send byte or word at a time), it should suffer from crosstalk less, and be able to go somewhat longer distances (say 3 feet, as a WAG).

      But for networking, you often need something a lot longer than that (say a few hundred meters). So that won't really work. Anyway, it is very hard for something new to break into the wired networking space; Ethernet has that area pretty well sewn up.

    2. Re:Use the high-speed link for networking by james@rtweb.net · · Score: 1

      It sends a bit at a time, just like the name would suggest. It's a four-wire setup, and it includes power.

  6. Serial ATA by Ahr|man · · Score: 1

    Seems that those longing for SATA controlers may be in luck. Use the fish and go here watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/2002/0514/3ware.htm.

    1. Re:Serial ATA by c0dE+fReAk · · Score: 1

      SATA seems to be the way to go.... but what about the ATA-133.

    2. Re:Serial ATA by Ahr|man · · Score: 1

      What about ATA-133? SATA will support 150MB/s, will draw less power, use smaller cables, be directly connected therefore doing away with the master/slave and C/S problems. Plus it will scale to 300MB/s in a few years. Read all about it here and here and here.

  7. What ever happened to fay ray... by fdragon · · Score: 1

    And what ever happened to IBM SSA drives & controllers. These are also 4 wire, serial drives with a ring bus.

    80 mbit access on the wire, and since it was ring, you could hook up only one drive and get 160 mbit from a single device because you had two paths to it from the controller.

    Looks like the same thing but this time we are going ATA to get it to market.

    Move along, no original ideas here....

    --
    The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
    1. Re:What ever happened to fay ray... by larien · · Score: 2

      SSA is still alive and well, although it tends to only get used with IBM systems. The IBM marketing says it will work with other vendors (including Windows), but I haven't seen it used elsewhere.

  8. Serial ATA == Too Good for Itself by VortexVertigo · · Score: 1

    I've been interested in Serial ATA since I first read about it a couple of years ago. I've been disappointed by the lack of news on it's progress, although Intel has apparently been demoing it in their future tech systems. Personally, I think part of the reason for the lack of news is due to wariness from the hard drive manufacturers but it could just be the usual delays in implementing something new. Hopefully, this will only mean a slow introduction and won't kill the new interface. Don't expect serial ata to become the standard until motherboard chipsets start to support it (next year).

    The article that peaked my original interest - Anandtech Serial ATA

    To answer the other part of the question, ATA RAID is a good solution for those who can't afford SCSI RAID. But for large organizations with deep enough pockets SCSI is still the best for perfomance, reliability, and warranteed MTBF.

  9. Just bought Qlogic 2200 Fibre Channel adapter, $50 by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sometimes, you have to love ebay. I still need a few drives, for which the smaller ones go about $1 per gig. 256 drives before I run out of room. The only thing that will hurt me price wise, is a decent rackmount drive case. Software raid, at very nearly the max theoretical throughput.

    SCSI was nice, but it is dead. IDE is alive, but it sucks. Fibre channel is seen as an enterprise-only tech, and they no longer have use for the small stuff on their SANs. I'm not so proud that I won't humbly accept their table scraps.

    Oh, and before anyone else mentions it... I don't have to use expensive fiber. That's only for ridiculously long cable runs. 20 meters max for stp cat5. More than enough.

  10. IDE/SCSI drive adapter; SCSIDE by Sm · · Score: 1
    I've been trawling the web recently and came across an circuit board that has an IDE plug and a SCSI socket. Two variants, Ultra or UltraWide. SCSIDE

    Still a little expensive at US$50-$75, but better than paying full price for SCSI drive prices. Some nice benchmarks would be nice, then I just need to convince myself that I need 4xUW converters and a dual channel UW SCSI controller.

    1. Re:IDE/SCSI drive adapter; SCSIDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Kinda puts a bullet through the general case "SCSI is worth the price" argument, doesn't it.

      IDE drives have fine transfer rates and seek times. What they lack are the SCSI target support features that let the controller drive all the disks' seek and transfer functions independently of the others.

      I dunno about expensive, tho'. For $200 you get a 5 year wty, 120GB, 7200RPM drive. Add $75 for $275/drive and end up with $2.29/GB

      SCSI? Same wty, 73GB, 10K drive is $460, ending up at $6.30/Gb.

      So, you can buy 2.72 7200RPM IDE drives or 1 10K SCSI. Mirror the IDE's and you get 14.4KRPM throughput, and save almost the cost of a spare drive. You can shave $40/drive and use 5400 IDE at $160.

      Mirror the 5.4K's to get 10.8K throughput and two seek arms, the same 5 year wty as SCSI, built in backup, a spare drive, and a few bucks left over for lunch.

  11. Adaptec's Opinion by xrayspx · · Score: 2

    I remember being at Adaptec Live SPAM Session at MS Technet a few years back. The Adaptec rep told of his many trips to drive manufacturers, particularly Seagate.

    He said that SCSI drives come off the same lines as IDEs, if the batch can handle running at 10000 RPM, they're Cheetahs, if they can do 7200, they're Barracuda SCSI's, if they have a lower MTBF, they're IDE 'cudas.

    I never really believed him, since the physical drive cases are different, but his contention was that they were all the same drives, with different electronics slapped on depending on MTBF.

    Take it for what you will, BIG Grains of Salt...

    I'll...I'll put strychnine in the guacamole.

    --
    I like music
    1. Re:Adaptec's Opinion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What with a 5 year "no hassle" wty on for both IDE and SCSI, who really cares?

      Anyway, MTBF is a design factor - not something measured post-production.

    2. Re:Adaptec's Opinion by xrayspx · · Score: 2

      The 'who cares' factor is decided by the 'how fast can I run this without it melting' factor.

      I agree that the MTBF must be the result of more stringent engineering, maybe, who knows. I myself think the guy is full of shit, but what do I know? I was jaded by the fact that logically, of friggin COURSE he's going to say that, he wants to sell more Ultra160 SCSI adaptors, duh. But maybe he wasn't full of shit, I leave that decision as an excersise for the reader.

      --
      I like music
  12. Re:Just bought Qlogic 2200 Fibre Channel adapter, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    hmm ... are you sure about that 256 figure? last i knew, the qla2x00 maxed out at 127

    stp cat5 ... are you using those adapaters from those jokers at cinonic?

  13. Re:Just bought Qlogic 2200 Fibre Channel adapter, by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 2

    Am I bad, you're right on the 127 figure. Not that I'll get close to that either.

  14. Re:Just bought Qlogic 2200 Fibre Channel adapter, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lol

    a number of months ago, i built a 56x18g fc array based on a qla2100. got the specs from sandin's site as soon as a link to his site showed up on bp6.com (the system that drove it was also a bp6)

    i ran software raid using vinum on it ... i think i had 8 raid-5 volumes (6+1) concat'd together ... came out to around 800g or so

    what are you planning on using for the enclosure(s)? i got lucky and found 4 14 disk arrays (empty, but with trays ... then i yanked out backplanes for the adapter) at a dot bomb auction

  15. Re:Just bought Qlogic 2200 Fibre Channel adapter, by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 2

    The card itself is on the way. Need to get drives yet. I really want a nice looking rackmount box... but I don't even have a rack yet. Would love to be able to get matching 4U ATX and disk enclosure cases. My current home server is a crappy old dual p100 tower, but I'm getting ready to build my rackmount dual athlon server. Heck, I may even build more than one, eventually, cluster the things. The fibre channel raid is primarily going to be used for my soon to be rackmounted DirecTivo's (only have 2 so far, gonna up it to 4 directivos soon).

  16. DRM anyone? by beat.bolli · · Score: 1

    I'm all for using smaller cables in my cases, but wouldn't this be *the* opportunity to sneak in some consumer-unfriendly Digital Rights Management scheme?

    --
    Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
  17. When motherboards support it by jhines · · Score: 2

    When the next generation of motherboards comes out with support for 4-8 serial disk ports, as well as the USB, Firewire, LAN, and other ports, then ATA can be left for cdroms and the like.

  18. What about Firewire/ieee1394 by GreenKiwi · · Score: 1

    I have been wondering why people are pushing serial ata and not Firewire/ieee1394. The 1394 protocol seems to be quite good, with their second version coming out soon with extremely fast transfer rates.

    Has anyone done any studies comparing 1394 to ATA and SCSI? I would be really interested to see that.

    Some other things I've been wondering are whether there are ATA133-to-1394 adapters and firewire raid solutions. It would seem to be excellent for creating less expensive raid devices.

    1. Re:What about Firewire/ieee1394 by majorero · · Score: 1

      I don't know about the firewire raid, but Apple has been doing the ATA to firewire conversion thing for quite some time. In fact you can buy external disk enclosures, that include power supply, converter, etc and support standard ATA33/66/100/133 drives.

    2. Re:What about Firewire/ieee1394 by GreenKiwi · · Score: 1

      However, I'm not sure whether the ATA side of enclosures runs at ATA33/66/100 or 133. Most firewire disks available today are just repackaged IDE drives. Just wondering how they compare when connected to firewire.

  19. SATA RAID by jo42 · · Score: 1

    You could do some nice kick butt SATA RAID controllers. Each drive having its own channel, very fast RAID processor. Yum.

  20. Re:Taged Comand Queueing by Chaostrophy · · Score: 2

    Is what seperates SCSI from IDE, but it's in the IDE spec, and people are working on it for the 2.5 linux kernel, there have been two recent patches implementing it.

    Right now, you can bet that most drive and chipset suport for it is bugy as hell, but if people start to use it, it will improve.

    --
    Plato seems wrong to me today