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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."

13 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. changes in SCSI land ? by vluther · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ?.

  2. Wrong link by tandr · · Score: 5, Informative

    the right place is to point to ST3120023AS and not ST3120023A

  3. Why don't we see 10K drives? by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why don't we see 10K drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Why don't we see 10K drives? by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?)

  4. Serial Drives? by Snowgen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow--A serial drive! is it true the the project's code name was Commdore 1541? :)

  5. Re:Hot swapping by MORTAR_COMBAT! · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    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 :) in general, serial ATA hot swapping will look a lot like USB.

    MORTAR COMBAT!

    --
    MORTAR COMBAT!
  6. 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.

  7. Drive not available until August! by kirkb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  8. Re:Missing advantage by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, Serial ATA has one drive per channel. I think most controllers come with at least 4 channels.

  9. Yet ANOTHER standard. by Chmarr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ?

  10. 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.

  11. Interface change-over and creeping DRM 'features' by SN74S181 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.