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Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the faster-is-better-when-you-don't-crash dept.

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."

2 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Missing advantage by man_ls · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:What about CPU utilization? by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.