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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."
the right place is to point to ST3120023AS and not ST3120023A
the IBM hot swapping you are talking about is supported mostly by software drivers -- i.e., the hardware does it, but it doesn't break your running software because there is a whole bunch of fancy drivers going on under the covers. i'll have to admit, it WAS neat the first time i hot-swapped a PCI card...
:) in general, serial ATA hot swapping will look a lot like USB.
the new serial ATA standard hot-swapping is also driver-supported, but the primary difference is that the hardware is much simpler, thus it is cheaper to build and design than a big IBM server. also, serial ATA will probably not include power supplies
MORTAR COMBAT!
MORTAR COMBAT!
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.
Ultra 320 SCSI (320 MB/s)
Ultra 640 SCSI (640 MB/s)
Fibre Channel (10 Gbit/s over 10 Km)
iSCSI (SCSI over Ethernet, hopefully 10 Gbit/s)
plus SCSI-like protocals/behavior in Firewire, etc.
That would make sense. I should have included an IIRC, but I swear in the press release that I read, you could have the extra devices. However that could be wrong, I followed links around the aforementioned article, and the MSI board with the new KT400 chipset has 12 serial ATA connectors. It is possible I misread the press release and thought that you got more devices by chaining them together....oh well
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
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
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).
The difference between SCSI and ATA is not merely the interface. SCSI drives are aimed at the server market, and are manufactured to a higher standard. IDE drives are aimed at the consumer market, and are manufactured accordingly. SCSI drives are far more reliable. That is the primary reason they are much more expensive. The silicon (the chips that make the interface to the computer) on a drive represents a tiny fraction of the overall drive cost.
Also, the cd recorders that you find are actually SCSI over IDE emulation.
As a side note, SCSI and ATA are on a fundamentally different model. The ATA model is to minimize host controllers and move all the smarts to the drive, thereby minimizing costs. The SCSI model is to have two controllers on each side, thereby minimizing host overhead. In terms of raw throughput, ATA is on par with SCSI. In terms of host overhead, SCSI will always be ahead of ATA.
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.
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.
SCSI has a lot of things going over ATA. ATA133 can only handle one device, if you use more it bumps down to ATA66. SCSI on the other hand can handle 7 devices, and as such makes an excellent high-speed RAID platform. SCSI isn't going away any time soon, as no self-respecting video/photo/audio professional would use a rig with an ATA setup.
So, what changes are you expecting?
Maybe prices down at something reasonable. I just saw an 80GB Maxtor SCSI drive at Microcenter. The price? $800!!! I can understand a premium for SCSI, but let's be realistic about it. When I can get 80GB ATA100 Maxtor drives for $75-$80 after rebate, $800 is just out of the question. Most users would see more of a performance increase by purchasing an 80GB IDE drive and buying ooh-gobs of RAM with the savings.
And this is coming from someone that used to run an all-SCSI system prior to the prices going through the ceiling. I think that by making SCSI something only used for high-end systems, they have relegated it to a slow death.
Rounded Hard Drive cables
http://www.wdc.com or http://www.wdc.com/products/products.asp?DriveID=2 7
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?
Probably because it costs no less to manufacture than large, fast hard drives.
There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days.
Shouldn't your userID be BOFH? I have 10+ gigs of MP3s from my CD collection on my hard drive.
So they just wind up only getting a 6 gig partition.
You do this intentionally? I'm sure your userID needs changing.
Lotta waste.
Of what? It's the same amount of matter.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Because once you have the ability to make high capacity drives, the lower capacity drives aren't any cheaper to make.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You were right on the money untill you brought up the old CPU utilization argument. With UDMA the CPU utilization of modern IDE controllers on todays GHz processors is trivial.
The initial Serial ATA will run at 150MB/s (which is faster than the current ATA/133 @ 133MB/s).
However, with the exception of Seagate, all the other Serial ATA drives (from Maxtor, WD, Samsung, etc.) are "donglized" drive, meaning there's a (Marvell) "Parallel ATA-to-Serial ATA" converter chip sitting between the drive and SATA controller. So essentially these are still ATA/133 or ATA/100 drives, and their top Burst Read speed is still bound by either 133 or 100 MB/s. Seagate will be the only "native" Serial ATA drive capable to hitting 150 MB/s. The best I've seen is around 112 MB/s Burst Read.
Also, the initial Serial ATA controllers will only have 2 channels (meaning two drives), but later versions should have 4 or more channels.
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.
Because it's cheaper for Seagate (or whoever) to kick out 50,000 40GB drives than it is to make 50,000 drives spread out over 10 different product lines. It's the same reason that a P3 600 is technically identical to a P3 800. (I speak from personal experience.)
Economies of scale.
- 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.Actually, I wouldn't object to all my devices connected via ethernet, either. That would be kinda cool :) There's several neat things that Firewire addresses that would also need to be addressed with using Ethernet (all of which are doable):
- Firewire sends power down it's cable, if the device wants it.
- Firewire establishes a protocol for identifying devices and their capabilities
- Firewire defines protocols for several device classes.
- The time between connecting and usability is very small with firewire. (The negotiation period for Gigabit ethernet can be several sections.)
So, I agree that we could very well have used Ethernet instead of Firewire. When Firewire first came out, it addressed several issues that Ethernet could not (such as >100Mbps). Ethernet's certainly caught up in the speed regard, but Firewire was already established at that time... so... there's probably no need to go back to ethernet now, and there's certainly no need to add another standard on top of the current peripheral standards (FireWire and... (ugh) USB 2.0).
And... I certainly wouldn't complain about a 25c/device licensing fee, if it means i get greater interoperability.
Actually, SCSI stands for "Small Computer SYSTEM Interface", and almost all SCSI standards are parallel implementations. Firewire was designed to be more or less protocol-compatable with SCSI, while changing the physical implementation of it.
Actually, no, it really is MB/s (megabytes per second). No drive can actually sustain that speed, of course, but the buffer can use it. To use WD's famed drive with an 8MB buffer as an example, the buffer completely empties in about 60 milliseconds. To think... just a little bigger, and you could load ALL of Doom 1 in less than 1/10 of a second (if it were already in the read-ahead buffer, of course).
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Is there some sort of disadvantage to SCSI going the way of the dinosaur as a standard if IDE moves in to accomodate the same featureset, give or take, as the customers request?
That's a big "if." Right now, SCSI allows many devices per controller. The drives themselves are much more intelligent and respond to a much more advanced command set. The performance of SCSI drives is considerably better and are a genuine "must-have" for many I/O bound server applications. Of course, the IDE drives we have now have better performance than the SCSI drives of a few years ago, so both camps have been moving forwards.
IDE is a real bastard standard that grew out of an emulation of the primitive disk controllers on the IBM PC/XT and AT. Unlike the much more elegant SCSI standard, it's really a kludge. But, through constant improvements, it has become quite the workhorse, with very respectable performance.
What I find so frustrating is that SCSI does not have to cost an arm and a leg. There is nothing in the SCSI interface itself that adds hundreds of dollars to the price of a hard drive. In fact, about a decade ago, there was only a marginal price difference between SCSI and IDE. But drive manufacturers seem to have gotten greedy, charging far too much for SCSI drives. The drives themselves are often a generation behind IDE when it comes to data density. And the limited market caused by the stratospheric pricing means that SCSI is not getting the development that it needs to continue advancing in performance.