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The Coming of Serial ATA
GrendelT writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the newest Serial ATA gadgets that are soon to hit the market. With speeds of 150Mb/s, thinner and longer cables, backwards compatibilty with Parallel ATA (what most of us have right now), and the option of being hot-pluggable, it seems the next step in storage technology is upon us."
Yeah, that's just the kind of contortions I'd rather get away from... Take a hard look at that picture, and tell me that it's good engineering..
cause an ideal 40MB/s max isn't really a lot to write home about.
OTOH, with just two disks/channel, it's more than most single drives can emit.
Probably. Besides, serial ATA is designed to be software-compatible with the old ATA. So you will still be able to use older operating systems with the new ATA, whereas firewire might not be supported.
That's what I originally thought, too. But the story title is a typo: They're talking about 150MegaBytes/sec, not bits.
The next version of firewire on the horizon will only be able to do 100Megabytes/sec (800Megabits/sec).
Still, I'd much rather they dump Serial ATA altogether and concentrate on FireWire. 100Megabytes/sec is just plenty, and FireWire is a much more general and flexible standard.
I don't know why everyone else keeps just putting whatever they feel like but I always use these conventions when writing about data: mbps (ALL LOWERCASE) = megaBITS in BASE10 per second. MB/sec (BOTH UPPERCASE) = megaBYTES in BASE2 per second. Oh BTW, for those looking for controllers, 3ware, http://www.3ware.com has mentioned they'll have SerialATA versions of their RAID5 controllers in 4, 8, 12, and 16 channel versions next quarter via converter bridges, and probably native SATA-II controllers. What dissapoints me most is the power connector. 15 pins? Come on. I thought power was going to be included in the 7 pin cable. Now we have a power cable 2x larger than the data cable, and it's still going to be a pain.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The poster was wrong... SerialATA supports 150MB/s, not 150Mb/s.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Don't know if you know this or not, but Serial ATA is 150MB/s... as in, 150 megabytes per sec.
hit shift-reload in your browser. those are cached images
the direct linked ones do have hotlinking protection apparently
Just say no to round ATA133 cables. Every other wire on an 80-wire IDE cable is a ground. It's there to shield the data wires from one another.
When you bunch the individual wires up like that, you destroy the shielding. At high data transfer speed, you are going to get CRC errors due to interference, and this means lower performance as the IDE controller has to deal with them.
Rounded cables are suitable for low speed applications like CDROM and floppy drives.
I've been reading through the postings and I read that article on Tom's this morning. I've been following Serial ATA for a while now and there is some information that is apparently obscure that most people dont understand...so...I will try to create a list of the good qualities of Serial ATA to help you guys sort through the crap:
1) It is backwards compatible with your current drives.
Now most of you might not care about this but it actually saves alot of money for motherboard makers when it comes to designing a board to support it. Less pins means less tracings which means lower development and production costs which means cheaper motherboards. Not to mention, manufacturers of drives dont have to seriously retool their lines and redesign their drives...which means no elevated hard drive cost when you buy new drives. Also there are adapters out there for current drives (as demonstrated in the article) so that you dont have to format and reinstall when you upgrade your motherboard.
2) It is built with the future in mind.
Much like original ATA, Serial ATA was designed with room to grow. Sure, it supports up to 150MB/s right now with no drives to go along with it...but when those drives come along (in 5+ years) it will be there to support it....and faster. The standard can ramp up in speeds.
3) Chipsets will now be easier to design.
With less pins to worry about in the design of the bridge chipset that serves as the interface for the drives, these interfaces become simpler to design...and you will be able to add more drives to the machine than ever before. You shalt no longer be limited to 4 drives in your box requiring a slow PCI adapter to connect them to (whoever thought that was a good idea anyways?).
4) Lower power requirements.
I shouldnt have to elaborate on that....I have to have a 450watt PSU in my current box just to handle the load. It will be nice when I can step that down to a 400watt. Nuff said.
5) HOT PLUGGABLE DRIVES!!!
You have no idea how long I have waited for this. Put a second drive in a removable slot....copy my 40GBs of 'files' onto it...take it over to a friends place...put the drive in...give him a copy of the 'files'. Oooooh....and backups to hard drives that you can easily remove and take to a safe deposit box. I don't really need to explain how beneficial this is.
6) Thin thin thin thin cables.
I have to run a water cooling kit in my PC because the airflow is so atrocious in my mid-tower with my RAID 0+1 system and 4 drives. 80 pin connectors have really needed to go for a long time. Rolled cables helped a bit but they are still thick and cumbersome. Of course now I stand the chance of confusing my CDROM audio connector with my ATA connector...but thats a small price to pay when i get another 30 CFM's through my box just by changing some cables around.
These are just a few of the reasons that serial ATA is a good good goooooooood thing.
Stop slamming what you dont understand.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
"The reason this is useful is that you have a larger bus bandwidth, not that it benefits any one particular device."
Too bad Serial ATA is a point-to-point bus. One device per host interface.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The next version of firewire on the horizon will only be able to do 100Megabytes/sec (800Megabits/sec).
Wrong.
Source
IEEE 1394b allows extensions to 800Mbit/sec., 1.6Gbit/sec. and 3.2Gbit/sec., all over copper wire. It supports long-distance transfers to 100 meters over a variety of media: CAT-5 unshielded cable at 100Mbit/sec., existing plastic optical fiber at 200Mbits/sec., next-generation plastic optical fiber at 400Mbit/sec. and 50-micron mulitmode glass optical fiber at up to 3.2Gbit/sec. The improved speed and distance capabilities of 1394b result from two major improvements: overlapped arbitration and advanced data encoding.
The next gen can do over 320 MB/sec, even accounting for serial transfer overhead.