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Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards
bjschrock writes "Tech-Junkie reports that Asus is rolling out new motherboards with the new Serial ATA interface, along with AGP 8X support. Serial ATA will soon become pretty popular with the release of new hardware like the Seagate Baracudda ATA V hard drive, that sports a 8MB cache. The main advantage of Serial ATA, besides a slight speed increase, is the much smaller cable and the ability to hot-swap."
Neato.
Finally an advance that's a bit more than simply bumping up the clock rate!
scott
the much smaller cable
If there were no cables(i.e. wireless), computers would be so much easier to work on.
Smaller cables? HALLELUJAH! I hate having to dig through my computer like it was some sort of ancient miniature pyramid to find which cable goes where. It's so damn time consuming... hopefully, this will be the start of much smaller and more organized cables.
Oh, and by the way, first post. Whoo.
We have a couple of IBM servers where I work which support hot-swapping of most of the redundant components, including old-style ATA hard drives. Also things like power supply, network cards, etc.
Can anyone tell me the difference between this old-style hot swapping, and the hot-swapping available in this new-style Serial ATA standard? (The linked article didn't really explain that.)
Glad I held off, almost bought a new ASUS A7V333 today.
You've got that right about "hot-swap". Those hard drives become pretty hot in there.
not too mention that you can have more than two serial ATA devices on each controller, effectively eliminating the need for raid enabled boards that take 35 seconds to POST
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Somehow I don't see the value of being able to swap out all the drives.
Most of all, the drive you boot from. Sure you can switch it out, but that will probably result in a kernel panic. Heh.
Aside from that it seems to be a good idea. But I'm still not sure how I feel about a serial HD. I remember the USB HD I got a while back. Yow, it works but danm was it slow and most of all unreliable.
http://www.xpurple.com
With all the improvements happening in IDE world, along with USB 2, Firewire etc.. whats happening with SCSI ?
I'm probably not aware of anything past SCSI 3, since I can't afford it.. but what kind of improvements are in the pipeline ?.
My father's AGP was 8 bit ISA. "Check out the 16 colors!"
the right place is to point to ST3120023AS and not ST3120023A
I can see no reason for 10,000RPM and 15,000RPM drives to be SCSI-only anymore. consumer technologies like ATA133 or SerialATA are giving consumer drives bandwidth that they can't hope to consume. Do these 10K and 15K RPM drives really need a SCSI connection? What's the point of pushing faster and faster consumer bus connections if manufacturers are unwilling to take advantage of them with faster drives.
Regards, Guspaz.
Wow--A serial drive! is it true the the project's code name was Commdore 1541? :)
That Barracuda has something called a "3D Defense System." Guess no one will be messing with that data except the the Fourth and Fifth Dimensional imps.
Gotta love it when they come up with stupid names.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
25 June 2002
PC World
Seagate is demonstrating its first Serial ATA hard drive at PC Expo/TechXNY with the help of a prototype Intel motherboard, and promises to be among the first hard drive makers to deliver the new technology, in products this fall.
The technology demonstration comes just one day after Seagate announced another first: 60GB-per-platter hard drive technology. Barracuda ATA V 7200-rpm drives using the new 60GB platters will arrive in retail outlets by August, say company executives.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
a board with serial ATA....guess it's time to replace the 'ole AMD 450.
a llery2.htm
Here's some close-ups:
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/asus/p4s8x/p4s8xg
All I can say is, I won't miss ribbon cable. I've been waiting for something to come along to replace it.. woot!
I couldn't find any information on what the Serial ATA cable would actually be like though, does anyone have any information about that?
- or -
8-bit ISA cards could still support SVGA modes.
Amazing that he can implement a "lameness filter" but not a spellcheck, or ever bother to check the links.
IDE ribbon cables piss me off, too. That's why I bought some round IDE cables from my friends at newegg.com. Inexpensive, and they work just fine. Apparently, they also help improve your airflow by not blocking it as ribbon cables tend to. All in all, it's a good way to spend $20 (for a set of two).
could someone explain how a serial device could be faster then parallel , I always assumed that serial would be significantly slower do to only having one channel ware as parallel can have at least 8 (or 16,32,64 whatever)
Smaller cable? Pshaw... Sound like Martha Stewart of the Mobo set. Big cables, Baby!
I'm still of the mindset that parallel is better than serial, particularly where high bandwidth is concerned. Probably the _real_ advantage is that they'll be making the mobos for instead of $$$.
Hotswap, now that's a definite advantage, assuming your version of Windows doesn't decide you've suddenly changed the system too much and shuts down until you get Microsoft on the phone and they grant you a new code to allow you to keep running. (A friend replaced the CPU on his mobo and Windows stopped working, until he called Redmond and they gave him a 40-some letter code to continue, very nice of them, I can't imagine how we've done w/o that advantage all these years, but that was another story...)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't quite understand how is by nature faster in anyway than parallel. Fundamentally it is the other way around. 2x the parallel wired, 2x the data transfer rate, plus all the handshaking is much easier
Some of us still use SCSI just because of the extremely low CPU overhead it requires. The offboard controller can take care of burning a disc for me in the background while I play a quake 3 engine game, without any fear of buffer underruns. I'd like to look into cheaper hardware and Serial ATA certainly fulfills the speed & hotswap needs I have, but what about keeping overhead low? Anybody have any figures on this?
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
They *could* but the earliest ones didn't. Ever hear of CGA?
>8-bit ISA cards could still support SVGA modes
And they weren't limited to just 256 colour either.
There's no reason why you can't pump 16-bit or 24-bit data over an 8-bit bus. It just takes longer!
Here is a card that was once the envy of geeks everywhere...
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?
There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days. And we cant get smaller drives.
So they just wind up only getting a 6 gig partition. Lotta waste.
If you're having issues with a dual 1800+ system not being able to burn CDs on an IDE burner while multitasking - you have a configuration problem!
While I, too, rather liked good quality SCSI CD burners, I've come to the conclusion that they've come a LONG way with EIDE models - to the point where they're every bit as good for 99% of the situations out there.
The main reason I see an EIDE CD burner work poorly is because the user placed it on the same IDE ribbon cable as the device he/she wants to transfer files from, to the burner.
Remember, with IDE, both "master" and "slave" devices on a single ribbon cable are going to be sharing the same IRQ and I/O transfer addresses.
Therefore, if you want to do a lot of copying of existing CD-ROM discs to blank CDs, you *don't* want to put an IDE CD-ROM reader on the same ribbon cable that your IDE writer is on!
By the same token, if you're trying to make a CD (expecially "on-the-fly") from files stored on an IDE hard drive, you'll get better results if your IDE burner isn't sharing the ribbon cable with that IDE hard drive.
IMHO, the most flexible setup is using a SCSI CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM) reader, coupled with an EIDE CD writer, and IDE hard drives. Alternately, if you have a system with EIDE RAID, you can already place your IDE drives on seperate channels from your regular 2 IDE ribbon cables.
I personally hope I never have a 10,000 rpm drive. Rotational speed isn't the only factor, a higher rotational speed gets you more power usage, more heat and more noise. At these speeds you have to consider what stress on the media does to the recording surface, as well. A greater data density, on the other hand, can improve transfer rates while giving you a lower RPM, along with the lower power and noise that go with it. New head technology is promising us much greater data density (remember the recent /. article on terabyte drives?) I would much rather see the manufacturers focus on an approach that continues to improve data density than working on increasing rotational speed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think SCSI could be affordable for PC consumers if they'd make smaller drives. e.g. I'm only using 1.5GB of my hard drive now. My 7GB HDD seems far too large for my needs; the 80GB monsters I see now days seem fitting for mental patients and nobody else. I would gladly pay $130 for a 2GB Ultra160 HDD instead of $130 for a 60GB IDE HDD. Unfortunately they just don't make drives that small anymore, SCSI or otherwise, so I can't :(. Probably the smallest they come is 10GB or so, which is just way too expensive. I'm guessing I'm not alone in having very modest HDD space needs, but still wanting speed. Oh well, I'm sure if there was a market, someone would be out there already.
Rounded Hard Drive cables
Can someone explain to me the advantages of Serial/ATA over FireWire?
FireWire currently does all these things that Serial/ATA is promising, and there's even speed increases in the works. It would be really nice if PC motherboards started shipping with internal and external firewire ports as standard, and it would mean we'd start seeing native firewire external HDDs a lot sooner.
Do we really need ANOTHER standard ?
http://www.wdc.com or http://www.wdc.com/products/products.asp?DriveID=2 7
a)doubling speeds
b)doing small increments?
Why don't they just release a 16x AGP system and be done with? I think after our GFX cards can receive the library of congress in a billionth of a second from the cpu then we should be ok
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You all are so wrong. I have an IDE 32x CD-RW from LG attached to the _same cable_ with a CD-ROM drive, and as slave, no less. I can make a CD-to-CD copy in about 3 minutes while playing mp3's, watching DIVX, surfing the 'net and so on without ANY problems whatsoever. The key here is "buffer underrun protection", meaning if the CD-R's buffer is empty, it shuts down the laser and waits for more data, and then merrily continues from where it left off when it does get more data.
the 128GB limit the current ATA standard holds.
Has anyone else thought this might be a good time
to bump that up a little?
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
Does this mean that we will be able to use hdparm's -U option, swap drives, reenable the interface with -R and then go with the new drive?
I also wonder how Linux will just see the drives. No slave/master distinction anymore, so...?
and production lines is HUGE, HUGE, HUGE for hard drive platters.
It would be an enormous design and implementation task to get the lines able to produce multiple sizes.
It's the same with CPUs, the only reason it does not seem that way (all CPUs one speed) is the speed/yield spread.
They could limit the size seen by a firmware change but why in the world would you throw away capacity you're paying for?
The death of ribbon cables. *drool*
Of course, I used rounded ones, but the connections are still beastly.
When speeds get high enough parallel can't get to 2x, while serial can.
The wires in the parallel cables introduce all sorts of electrical effects like picking up RF and capacitance between the wires. Increasing the signal frequency aggravates this problem, doubling the number of connections doubles the thickness of the wire, and eventually it becomes more trouble than it's worth.
Serial cables using small numbers of connections can use thicker, shielded connectors, and because there are fewer of them the cable size stays manageable. The signal frequency can be increased much more easily due to the better isolation of the wires.
In short, the high end achievable by serial is higher than the high end for parallel because serial's weaknesses are easier to work around and engineer for.
PS - any electrical engineers out there that want to correct/amplify any of the points here, feel free. I'm just a mechanical-engineer-in-training who reads too much outside his field.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
I got the impression Serial ATA was also finally going to do away with the braindead addressing schemes we've suffered from since the 512MB limit first screwed us. The 512MB limit was fixed with a kludge, then we needed to refine the kludge for 2G, yet again for 8G, then for 32G and now it would seem the biggest addressable disk size on IDE is 128G (or about 137G if you speak in disk manufacturer mathematics?)
Isn't Serial ATA going to have 48-bit sector addressing, meaning you no longer deal with cylinders, sectors or heads, but simply by sector numbers? If a sector is 512 bytes, then we can address a 134217728GB disc with 48-bit sector addressing?
I wonder why everyone overlooks the fact that Serial ATA will remove the physical cable length restrioction of the traditional ATA interfaces.
IMHO its one of SCSI's major selling points that cables of LVD-SCSI can be > 5 m without problem.
On the Serial ATA website they claimed that they lifted that restriction, but now, how long can they be ?
(and for cable length, thy building a big tower, with a HD near the top. standard IDE cables don't cut it.)
Check out this article at Hardware Central.
My first thoughts are that smaller HD cables aren't really that big of an improvement, not enough for me to purchase new hd's to replace existing ata-100/133 drives. Actually I've been using round IDE cables from http://www.xpcgear.com/ultraata133ide.html They work wonderfully and take up significantly less space. You also get some cooling benefits as well due to better airflow for you overclockers and people with many hd's installed...
The move from the current standard to serial ATA is as much to allow for backwards compatibility as increased speed & features. There are plans for adaptors for current drives for use with serial ATA controllers. FireWire interfaces would require all new drive hardware in addition to the motherboard. Simple truth is, forklift upgrading scares folks. They -much- prefer to upgrade piecemeal.
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Yes and no. Serial cables do have the thickness advantage, but an equivalently shielded serial cable has to be 1/N where N is the number of bits as long as a parallel cable to achieve the same maximum data transfer rate. This is from a basic EM point of view, that the electrical length of a wire is doubles as the frequency doubles.
Any shielding you can perform on a serial cable can be performed on a parallel cable as well. Differential pairs, like the ones used in USB reduce the capacitance the signals see and maintain the waveform shapes, but this is because for data transfer rates of 12 Mb/s or whetever USB is now days, the wires need a bandwidth of 24 MHz. An equivalent Parallel implementation would require a wire bandwidth of 1.5 MHZ which is pretty easy to design for.
There are of course many advantage to serial communication that go beyond these electrical considerations. It is so much more practical and easy to modulate a serial system than a parallel one which is why all communication (cellular, ethernet..etc) uses a serial baseband. Otherwise we would need as many carriers as there were parallel bits. Which is not really inpractical, as the fastest way to increase your data transmission rate on a cellular system is to use N phones in parallel with different ESNs.
So the moral of the story is any serial system can be made faster with a parallel equivalent. Certain systems are naturally more easily and efficiently designed serially, especially those requiring communication over a shared medium.
from the serialata.org technical whitepaper, the protocol not only uses a serial method of data transmission (as opposed to the current parallel method), but the roadmap starts it at 150mb/s, then goes to 300mb/s and 600mb/s (!) as the technology advances. I'm running ATA133 drives right now, and they definitely don't even touch that.
Looks like the benefits don't stop at smaller cables. (btw, rounded IDE cables are definitely available if you're concerned about that, and they work just beautifully)
My question is: How similar is this technology to IEEE1394 (aka FireWire, i.Link, etc). Is it just an internal implementation? That's what I get from some of the tech briefs on the web.
So why would I want to pay extra for the SCSI one to do the same thing?
In case you haven't been keeping up with IDE lately, you could rewrite that sentence with "IDE" instead of "SCSI" and it'd still be accurate. Modern IDE controllers (with UDMA) will not use more than 1-3% of the CPU (which is close enough to "extremely low CPU overhead" for me). And any modern IDE CD burner will have BurnProof, which will mean that even in the unlikely event of a buffer underrun, you won't burn a coaster -- the drive can just pause burning, and restart when the buffer is filled again.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
3ware has some nice boards to, check out these serial ata cards: http://wkamphuis.student.utwente.nl/3ware/serial/
SerialATA is nice and all.. But can you overclock it?
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
a huge part of scsi's price and speed/stability is that it's got it's own chip that manages everything more or less completely seperately from the rest of the machine.
many people have said they won't touch thier machines when burning with an IDE drive yet with scsi you can play quake and burn cd's and not be worried.
so what about a middle ground. couldn't motherboard makers put some IDE dedicated hardware onto boards so that the performance would be better and nothing would interfere like with scsi.
what if i buy a PCI IDE card. is this just expanding what is on my botherboard, or adding it's own chips the same way a scsi controller is. (maybe an IDE RAID card that you don't use as RAID , but just for the seperation benefit)
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
Since most truly heavy-duty servers will use RAID anyway, individual drive reliability isn't really a huge issue -- if one dies, you just hot-swap it with another one, and haven't lost any data. Thus, high size*speed per unit price is really what you care about for a large server. You care about the performance of the overall RAID array; the individual disks themselves are just easily replaceable components.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The "serial" idea has already been done, it's called FireWire. I have trouble believing that implementing FireWire more expensive, in large quantities, as the chipset-makers churn out.
I've noticed Intel (and Maxtor and Seagate) are members of the 'Serial ATA' group. Is this being done, instead of just using FireWire, because of Intel not wanting to put FireWire support into their chipsets?
Has anyone seen a site with a nonbiased side-by-side comparison of the various technologies (USB2 / Firewire / SATA / FC [?] / U160~320 ) and what drives they're available on, and what the perfomacnce is?
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I am the proud admin of a fairly new IBM RS6000/p660 server that is equipped with an SSA disk array. These 10K rpm disks are even faster and better performing than Ultra160 SCSI at about the same price. I'm really impressed with this technology and would love to see some rendition of "SSA-lite" type of technology finally make it to the desktop workstation world. It make even render SCSI disks obsolete.
As other people have mentioned. Firewire only handles 400Mbit/s. That's 50megabytes/second. That's cutting it awfully close if we're going to allow for IDE drive speed increases since drives can alrady hit the 30-40megabyte/s range.
SerialATA starts out at 1.2Gbit/s. That's 153.6megabytes/s. Nearly a 3x improvement. Gen2 of SerialATA is already planned and it's double that (or 300megabytes/s).
Yeah I have a SVGA card in my XT! So, yes it dose work!
I thought drives were already hotswappable? Here's what i'v done: In Linux, unmount the fs, spin down the drive, yank it out. Then you can just put it back in(you get an "IDE reset succsesful" message) then mount the fs. In NT i'v just yanked the main drive out, the system locks up, put the drive back in, wait... ...the system works again. So i see no reasom why the old ATA HW whould'nt support hotswapping. Now if being able to replace a drive while the computer is running does'nt count. What does? I admit i have'nt tried replacing a drive that actually broke, but i see no reason why that whould'nt work(if you succseeded with unmounting the fs that is) While typeing this i also got some fancy ideas about a kernel that could probe for new drives at any time -> no reboot for that hd upgrade.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Don't forget Serial ATA II http://www.serialata.org/news/S2why.pdf
Rip that array open and have a look at the individual drives. They are U160 drives, right? :)
Can someone tell me the advantage of FireWire over Ethernet? FireWire is 200-800 Mbps (soon to be 1.2 Gbps) and up to 64 devices connected. Ethernet is 10Mbps to 10Gbps and supports over 4 billion devices connected with much longer cables. And there's no Apple licensing fees.
Got friends?
The Serial ATA standard supports hot-swapping not just because of drivers/software/etc, but mostly just because the ground wires on the connection are slightly longer than the others (so the grounds connect first or last when you plug it in/unplug it, so you're less likely to blow something up). As far as Windows knowing the drive isn't there anymore, that's a driver/software issue.
Any time an interface-changeover occurs, it's important to look at what else is on the horizon at the same time. Will the first 5% of drives with this new interface be the only ones without build in Digital 'Rights Management' (DRM) features?
I see this as a great opportunity for the DRM advocates to obsolete all older drives ("sorry, your old drive won't plug into the new motherboards") and force a change-over to the new drives with DRM in their firmware.
Just a point to ponder.
I recently bought an ASUS A7V133 thinking I was safe in terms of stability. Nope, far from it. Wouldn't install XP or 2000 with the latest BIOS update (or the last 4). I also got a lot of data integrity problems, i.e. scan disk would find stuff almost every time I ran it (even with proper shutdowns). Now I am running a cheap Amptron and have yet to have a problem. I guess you don't always get what you pay for. So,back to the topic at hand, what makes you think ASUS's forage into new IDE controllers is going to help their MB's stability? Not much. I think I'll pass. ...Michael...
The Serial ATA cables can be at least a meter (I'm not sure of the exact spec). There are also bridges/hubs/whatever that will be available to increase that.
I don't know about you guys (gals?), but I've been running with a dual-tower setup for the last two years. I've got my mobo/cpu in one tower, and the hard drives in another right next to it. I do this because putting them all together produces too much heat, but as you can imagine, my IDE cables are just barely long enough.
What I'd like to see is some sort of bus-extension cable, which I think would be possible with Serial ATA due to its simplified wiring scheme. Give me a shielded 2-3' cable that breaks off into 4-8 separate SATA connectors so that I can relocate the hard drives easily.
I know I could accomplish something similar with current tech by using a PCI-to-PCI-bridge and housing the entire IDE controller in the second case, but those things are prohibitively expensive in my situation. If this serial thing allows longer cable runs, then it's obvious that a 20$ cable is financially better than a 600$ PCI bridge.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Reading that I thought I was reading a SCSI specification! Seeing phrashes like commmand queuing, out-of-order execution/delivery, and scatter/gather! Topology support for multi-inititaor networks sounds a lot like what SCSI can do, with having two SCSI cards on a bus accessing the same drives. Cool
Got friends?
Does this mean that at some point we can expect to see processors, memory modules, and other support chips with serial interfaces? This would surely simplify motherboard designs and lead to even higher motherboard front-side bus speeds.
- Support for the SCSI protocol
- Support for tagged queueing, allowing the drive to multitask. The standard ATA and SATA protocols do not support this yet.
- A single port can connect to multiple drives through an expander (similar to a switch). Currently, SATA is a strict point to point connection.
- Multiple adapters can talk to the same drives.
- Backward compatible support for SATA drives using a tunneled protocol that even allows multiple adapters to talk to the same SATA drive.
- Initial speeds of 1.5 Gb/s and 3Gb/s per port, compared to SATA's 1.5Gb/s per port
Expect Serial Attached SCSI to be targeted at the server market. SATA will be targeted more at the desktop and low end servers where performance and reliability aren't as critical, but cost is.People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.
What is it with people complaining about their computers making noise anyway? I actually like my computers to sound like they're on...the lack of noise makes me nervous (see: Dead Silence, aka Power Outage). I have a computer by my bedside and the noise helps me sleep...in fact, I have a very hard time sleeping without that white noise.
Computers make noise, just like refrigerators make noise, washing machines make noise, and cars make noise. It's not like it's constant beeping, either, folks. Get ovah it.
Blog,Twitter
I hope there's somebody with some engineering background out there that can clear something up for me. Back in the day, we were taught from experience that serial (like an RS232) is slow and parallel (like the centronics printer interface) is fast. Yet, lately technology is turning back to serial encoding for high-speed performance interfaces like USB, S-ATA, FireWire, etc.
Is there a particular reason why parallel is being abandoned for new technology? Is it just too complicated to be efficient at high speeds or what?
What did I miss?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Serial ATA always struck me as redundant, since we already have IEEE1394. Most 1394 cards already have an internal connector, and it couldn't be that hard to manufacture internal 1394 drives.
So what's the reason to use serial ATA instead of IEEE1394? Cost? Is it easier to implement in the drives?
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
When will we see something better than PCI on consumer level motherboards? I realize that the "average" user doesn't need 66Mhz, 64-bit PCI slots, but it would be nice to have just one for high-bandwidth applications (RAID card, gigabit ethernet).
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not an expert here. In fact, you seem to have quite a bit of knowledge based on your other posts in this thread.
So I'm going to punt (ie. appeal to authority): storagereview.com's hard drive reference.
While it may be true that a faster parallel equivalent can be created for any serial system, it may not be economical to do so. If it's cheaper to double the frequency of your transmission than to double the number of connections then it makes sense to stay with serial (or in this case, revert to it). According to the reference I linked above, it looks like this will be the case for the next while.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
This Serial ATA sounds a lot like Fibre Channel.
Fibre Channel is like Serial SCSI. It runs at 1 or 2 Gbps, supports 125 drives per loop, and is hot-swappable with proper backplane support (port bypass circuits, so taking a drive out will not break the loop). Fibre Channel backplanes are incredibly expensive, but I wrote up a schematic for drive interface cards (T-cards) that cost about $9/drive. Assuming Serial ATA reaches these speeds, I'll have to upgrade...
I recently built a small Fibre Channel drive array for some high-performance storage needs. RAID5'd together, 9 Seagate 10,000RPM 9.1gb drives gave about 65gb usuable formatted space altogether. Transfer rates were incredible - 55 MB/s write, 80MB/s read, and it would be even more (write speeds would be higher) if the array ran RAID0. Only problem is that the array sounds like a jet engine starting up when you turn it on, and is very loud due to all of the cooling (3x 5" 12v 85cfm fans). Hopefully, the Serial ATA drives won't need this kind of environmental support...
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
You're neglecting the ~3 month lifespan of a SCSI drives. We ship those things back like there's no tomorrow.
Argh... reading that brought back a lot of bad memories. I/O address and IRQ conflicts, memory managers, etc., are things I'd rather not have ever thought about again, thank you very much.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Now don't get me wrong, there will never be a time when 100% of the population using computers is up to speed on stuff like that (at least not for the forseeable future) but to the people it matters to, the word is getting out. My father, a complete computer idiot, called me the other day and talked to me about some of the issues coming up. He's seen some of the Windows Media Player security creeping up on him and he doesn't like it. I never once mentioned it to him, but as more people get informed, they tell others about it. I do not ever expect to hear that stuff from my grandmother since she will probably never download an mp3 or movie file from the internet, but like I said... to the people it matters to the word is spreading.
I'll use the oft-cited reference of Divx. People found out that they would basically have to rent the movie every time they chose to watch it, which pissed off just about everyone. What was the response? Noone bought the technology. I have very little fear about hardware DRM creeping up in all technology (but maybe a few devices which people will choose not to buy). The market will dictate what is successful and what is not, so if hard drives start coming out with DRM in them I can see a huge disaster waiting to happen. Entire stockpiles of these devices will sit unsold until finally the maker takes them back and re-tools them to be non-DRM.
Hell, think back to the whole Intel processor serial number fiasco. It took Intel how long to give people an option to turn it off? Like 2 months I believe. Have faith in the population, people won't just lay over and accept stuff like that.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
If I run an encrypted filesystem (or not!) how the hell is a HARD DISK going to understand what It's storing?
If they claim to make it a windows only drive, then they're in for a shitstorm of bad publicity. People WILL complain, because it will have problems, and will hurt innocent users.
Oops! I guess you're right. It's a funny 80 pin connector called "SCA-2", no power connector like you'd expect, the power seems to be fed to the drive via the one massive connector... and I was also wrong about the 10K rpm too. They're 15K rpm drives :-)
Oh how I love hot swappable drive arrays. My boss just about crapped a cinder block when I yanked one drive out of the array while we were running the payroll job on the machine... Popped the drive back into the array and it took all of 10 minutes to re-syncronize the contents onto it.
We are using ethernet instead of firewire in very high-end systems, and this will continue and should trickle down to PCs within a few years. It's a revved-up ethernet called InfiniBand ( www.infinibandta.org ).
everything in moderation
Because firewire has lots of protocol overhead that isn't needed to connect a single device ala serialATA? Firewire is a robust, multidevice, chainable solution with packet information, device tagging etc. SerialATA is simply a 2point bus to get data from drive to controller, making the elctronics simple and cheap. Even at release motherboards and drives with serialATA will only sell for aprox $5-10 more than current parallel ATA implementations. Over time it will actually bring down the cost of the devices as ultimatly the electronics will be cheaper to produce.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Granted it's been a little while, but if i remeber corectly there were a ton of advantages to serial ata other then hotswapping. The nice things about serial ata is you can transfer data at around 150 megs/sec which is comparable to uw scsi 3. And unlike scsi the controller is onboard, so it doesn't have to deal with the 143 megs/sec pci bottleneck. Also with serial ata you are no longer limited to 2 devices per chain, the limit is closer to 7 or so.
With the recent proliferation of firewire camcorders and Apple iMacs with iMovie, a lot of people are getting interested in video editing on a home PC, and I must say having worked on both modern SCSI and IDE machines for this purpose that a SCSI machine is much nicer for video editing.
The "one device on the bus at a time" problem with IDE means it is basically impossible to do any meaningful copying or editing of one video while burning another video to DVD. With SCSI on the other hand such a thing barely causes your system to break out a sweat.
So I think it's unfair to say to home users that they will never see any gains from SCSI--remember that at one time there were some people who said that a 486 was all the average user would ever need, and boy were they wrong.
As far as I know, SCSI *IS* the low cost PC-version of SSA? Also, SSA uses SCSI disks as the previous preponder says?
Of course, I could just be paranoid. :)
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Since the topic is disks it might be the time to point to the Multi Disk HOWTO (part of the LDP) that gives you the practical detail on how to make the most of your disk(s).
BTW one important topic that was not mentioned in earlier threads is that with SCSI disks you can be sure you have flushed a file from disk cache to platters but NOT on ATA drives. While this may sound banal, this is hugely important to database people in the event of crashes. Check up on the comp.arch.storage newsgroup for the sordid details. ATA pretends it flushes but does not in a guaranteed fashion, all in order to gain speed. Sure, it is OK for home use but not in business.
And in other recent news, Chicken Licken has announced that the sky is falling.
Multiple head assemblies in a hard drive sounds like a great idea, but doesn't work very well in practice. See here for info.
If my computer made white noise I would be fine with it, but it does not make white noise - it plays predictable harmonic patterns. The high pitch of the hard disk drone irritates my tinnitus, and the pitches have meaning to me, so my mind cannot help but process the incoming sounds. It's distracting. I can't sleep with the ringing in my ears...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Are you brain-dead? Put 2 serial line together, and the bandwidth doubled. Hyper-Transport can be 1 pair, up to 32 pair.
What you guys actually mean is the new-generation serial bus is faster than old generation parallel bus.
Any one remember RS-232 serial bus?
Marketing people call it serial bus.
The reason USB, FireWire is serial because the bandwidth is enough, and the cost of extra wire for long distance is expensive.
But it can be parallel. The hyper transport, serial PCI is in fact parallel, since most implementation use more than 8 pair of wires. Though the spec says it can work with 1 pair.
Hate those marketing guy scewed up the common sense.
What about my previous post was "wrong"?
I have no doubt you're having success burning discs with your IDE writer attached to the same ribbon cable as your CD-ROM drive. The point is, it works for you because you have a newer writer with the "burn-proof" type technology in it. That's really just a band-aid for the buffer-underrun problem. It works fine, yes - but my suggestions were aimed at IDE CD-burner users in general. Using your setup with an older IDE burner that lacks buffer-underrun protection will likely result in "coasters".
Thats a good question regarding an encrypted filesystem as I run a small one myself to keep important documents on.
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