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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 ?.
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? :)
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!
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.
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.
Yes, Serial ATA has one drive per channel. I think most controllers come with at least 4 channels.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 ?
Amen to that, dont ever try to run a hard drive and a CD-RW on the same channel. On a side note, does ATA or this serial ATA offload any of the processing to a special controller, ala SCSI, or is it still handled by the CPU?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
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.
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.
- 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.
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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.
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.
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