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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."
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 ?.
USB is a crap interface, with all of the transactions going through programmed IO. The reason it is popular is because it is cheap.
Firewire and SerialATA are much smarter and can read/write blocks/to from memory without having to go through the CPU. Thus they are much faster, but a little more expensive to implement.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I may be wrong, but wasn't one of the advantages of Serial ATA the fact that each device had a dedicated channel, meaning it got the full 100?MB of bandwidth -- as opposed to the current IDE archetecture where the slave drive gets less bandwidth then the master, and only 1 device per channel can be used at a time.
If you chain the devices together, you're defeating what I understand the whole purpose of the technology is--not only that, but there aren't really enough wires for a second or higher device, are there? I'd think it would run into data transmission problems.
Yes, Serial ATA has one drive per channel. I think most controllers come with at least 4 channels.
I read somewhere about a company trying to develop a fiberoptic system to replace the wires. Heat was proving to be much lower & speed was much higher using light waves. Anybody know where that article is? It's been a few months....
Or maybe I read it in Scientific American....can't remember now.
The main thing stopping you sending fast signals down parallel cables is transmission line problems. At high speeds, any wire effectively becomes a transmission line.
It's much MUCH easier to get just one wire right for super high speed data than it is to get 8/16/32 wires right. There's also the issue of ensuring that all the signals arrive at the destination at the same time.
So, technically, parallel is faster, but serial is much easier to get going real fast.
Probably the same reason SUV's are popular these days. Its not what people _need_, its what they _think_ they need.
(Above and beyond the obvious "bigger, faster" ideology that seems to be ever so popular with consumers these days.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
You know that is a good point. Its hard to find new small drives theses days. There are good reasons to wanting smaller drives too... like less time to defrag/fdisk/fsck. I wonder if we could put in a petition to companies like seagate and tell them to make at least one small drive.
Perhaps its not cost efficient with newer technology?
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -- Plato (427?-347? BC)
Some of us still use SCSI just because of the extremely low CPU overhead it requires
Uh... and what speed CPU are you running? A 200 MHz Pentium2?
Modern computers have so much extra horsepower nowadays it's absurd. Even maxed out an ATA133 drive won't consume more than 2-3% of a CPU nowadays.
burning a disc for me in the background while I play a quake 3 engine game, without any fear of buffer underruns
Any decent computer built in the past 2 years can handle that too. IDE drives don't make platters like they used to -- they've got large buffers and use techniques to ensure no buffer underruns. Yeah, they use more CPU than SCSI does. See above.
I used to be a big SCSI advocate... and I finally replaced the old SCSI-2 drives I had in one of my PCs with IDE drives. I increased the storage, decreased the noise, and improved performance of the system. The cost to replace the old drives with newer SCSI equivalents would've been absurd - nearly $1000 since it meant a new controller too. Instead I spent $60 on a CD-RW (12x/32x/48x - the cheapest SCSI CD-RW was 10/12/20 for 3x the cost), used an older IDE drive I had spare, and seriously boosted my system.
Does IDE/ATA have issues? Sure. The whole lack of command reordering, one device on the bus at a time, etc. -- but none of these are ever going to impact a home user. It's becoming questionable if they significantly impact low-end servers too. If you're putting together a database or a big ass file server, yes, go SCSI/RAID and get the best you can afford. Otherwise start understanding that modern IDE is really not the same as the old, crappy IDE that evolved out of MFM/RLL.
its called UDMA, learn it, live it, love it
my CPU utilization is zero with slight bounces up to a max of 10% (while having other programs running, but not in use)
so basically i can burn a CD, encode VIDEO, download files, have a dozen programs open and surf the web
You can boot off of firewire drives if your bios supports it, which apparently some do.
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
Or do what they did in the old days... multiple heads per platter. By making a 3.5" drive a bit longer they could throw in another head on the other side and it'd basically halve the rotational latency, as well as doubling the transfer rate.
Recently (since they've shrunk to 5.25 and 3.5" disks) it's always been cheaper to up the RPMs, but sooner or later it'll be cheaper to add more heads because of the problems in trying to up the speed.
Though given that the tape was faster than the hard disk on the C64, i`m not sure why people bothered.
As other people have said, that isn't true. The C64 tape transferred about 150 bytes/sec, which was effectively halved since, as you indicate, the content was recorded twice, since the tapes are relatively unreliable.
The unmodified 1541 transferred at about 400 bytes/sec. If you used a tape-speedup method, like COMPUTE!'s Turbo Tape, you can get transfer speeds approaching the 1541 speed.
With a fast loader, you can get between 1200 and 3500 bytes/sec from a 1541. A particularly good and general-purpose accelerator was/is JiffyDOS, which speeds up all operations.
The 1571 drive connected to a C128 can transfer about 4000 bytes/sec, since it uses a hardware shift register instead of the software method in a stock 1541. The 1541 was intended to use a hardware shift register, but the 6522-VIA chip in the 1541 was buggy, so Commodore did an "Oh shit!" and hacked together the software method. The 1571 uses a 6526-CIA chip which didn't have the shift-register bugs.
The 1581 drive (3.5" double-density) can transfer about 8000 bytes/sec to a C128. It has a full-track cache inside of the drive's microcontroller system, unlike the 1571, so it's not slowed down by sector-interleave issues.