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."

Comments

Why don't we see 10K drives?

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:Why don't we see 10K drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably due to heat issues. High RPM SCSI Drives go into server class machines with lots of fans and (usually) climate controlled raised floor locations. They are also noisy.

I'd imagine most consumers don't have adequate cooling for those drives and it would be expensive to keep warranty replacing them. Not to mention, cheaper IDE drives would steal away sales from (I suspect) more profitable SCSI equipment.

Re:Why don't we see 10K drives?

[iONiUM]

But even going from ATA100 to ATA133 with a 7,200RPM drive, there's a speed increase (granted not very large).

But if there are speed increases from just upping the bus, then perhaps increasing the RPM isn't necessary as much yet.

I do agree though, we need faster spinning drives now if we really want better speed... or maybe just huge ram drives

Re:Why don't we see 10K drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost. It costs more to make 10,000 rpm drives, and they don't feel the consumer market will support it enough to make it worthwhile. When Joe Average goes computer part shopping (assuming he does), he doesn't care about the drive speed too much. Instead, he just wants the most gb for the buck. When it comes down to it, 7200 rpm or even 5400 rpm is fast enough for most home users anyway. If they're doing something that needs more rpms, they should probably be using SCSI.

Re:Why don't we see 10K drives?

[Ryan Amos]

The main reason is because 10k drives aren't terribly durable. They need a fan assembly pointing at them or they get too hot and won't last a year. Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array. People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.

Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one. SCSI supports concurrent reads and writes, where ATA swaps them off. In reality you'll never see the 133 mbps in an ATA133 setup; where you'll come a lot closer with LVD160 SCSI. Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)

Re:changes in SCSI land ?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) It already has a "slight speed increase" over current ATA in the form of U320
2) It is already hot swappable.

So, what changes are you expecting?

Advantages?

[ackthpt]

The main advantage of Serial ATA, besides a slight speed increase, is the much smaller cable and the ability to hot-swap."

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...)

Why not smaller capacity drives?

[st0rmshad0w]

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.

Re:Why not smaller capacity drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drives have large fixed costs (controller, assembly, and casing). There is a size where all the information fits on one platter and going below that doesn't even eliminate the variable costs. So you could make small and fast drives but they wouldn't be cheaper than any other one platter drive (which is soon to be 60 GB).

Yet ANOTHER standard.

[Chmarr]

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 ?

Re:serial vs parallel

[Russ Steffen]

It's all about synchronization. As you increase the speed and/or the length of a parallel bus it gets harder and harder to keep all of those parallel signal paths syncronized. Eventially, a point of dimishing returns is hit, where the problems associated with driving a high speed serial bus are cheaper to overcome than the problems of a high speed parallel bus.

At some point in the future, someone may figure out a clever way of keeping a THz-level parallel bus in sync inexpensively. Until then, serial seems to be the way to go. Even the successor to PCI might be a serial bus.

Interface change-over and creeping DRM 'features'

[SN74S181]

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.

Re:Serial Vs. Parallel

[The Fat Guy]

At higher data rates, parallel busses start to run into a few problems:

- It is difficult to synchronize the signals so that you are sure that every line is at the correct level when the data is read. Of course, SCSI does this very well, but it takes careful design to get it right.

- Each signal line requires its own driver circuit, connector, wiring, power consumption, etc.

Serial communications help solve these problems in the following ways:

- fewer signal lines mean lower part count, lower power consumption, lower cost.

- synchronization is much easier (1 data line!) If you use a suitable addressing scheme, you can gang up as many synchronous channels as needed to move more data with very little overhead (though this is not done with Serial ATA as far as I know). Properly done, the bandwidth should scale almost linearly with number of channels.

- With fewer signal lines, it is easier to use techniques like LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) to minimize noise interference. Again this is done with parallel busses too (SCSI), but it is cheaper to do it for a small number of lines.

Re:changes in SCSI land ?

[Afrosheen]

I hate to snipe you from your high horse, but ata133 or even ata100 with a decent 7200 rpm drive will meet or beat any scsi less than scsi160. Mainly because most SCSI160UW drives are 10k rpm drives with big caches. At any rate, the bang for the buck award goes to IDE.

Let me put it this way. You're in the market for a fairly quick machine. You have 2k to spend. Do you put money into your video card, quality motherboard, ram and affordable, big, quick ata drives or do you skimp on EVERYTHING and get a crazy expensive scsi controller and an ungodly priced scsi 160uw 10k rpm drive? I think that one answers itself.

In a world where price is no object, everyone would use scsi. Unfortunately nobody lives in that world.

BTW your quip about self-respecting whoever using a rig with ATA? Guess what, once Apple was satisfied with A/V capable ATA drives they found the holy grail for bringing their price down. I've seen/used lots of A/V rigs with ATA drives. Apple had no choice but to use ATA to bring their prices down. No matter how you look at it, SCSI is and always will be overpriced.