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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."
This ought to help air-flow in the case a lot.
:)
My worst problem building mini-towers has been trying to tack the ribbon cables to the side where they won't block air, or run into a fan blade...
Screw the speed, etc... It's just a better cable
Come on guys, that is one of the biggest details on the story
Read the article. If you add a PCI Serial ATA card to an existing mobo you'll get max 133MB/sec which if i recall sounds familiar to parallel ata.
Not until serial gets its own bus will it be better. Until then just wait for the stuff to get cheaper.
The speed of this product really isn't the selling point, at least not now. Most 7200 ATA drives can't sustain much more than 40MB/s, let alone 150MB/s. The current ATA 133 is already overkill. The selling points are the small cable, the decreased voltage (signal voltage decreased from 5v to 150mv), the length increase, the future posibilities, and the adoption of much more popular serial design (similar to firewire and usb).
That an FireWire manufacturers don't want to give up their tasty tasty profit margins. The only reason ATA is even still around is because the drives are cheap. I'd bet if the manufacturers were willing to sell SCSI devices at consumer prices (say $25 to $40 more per drive over ATA to cover the cost of the electronics) most Slashdotters would be running SCSI and would scoff at ATA and lump it in with built-in video, built-in sound, and the built-in modems on consumer machines.
I hate ATA, but I still run it in my machines because I can't justify the 100%+ markup for SCSI devices. Heck, it's still really hard to get Command Tagged Queueing support on ATA devices, and the CTQ implementations I've seen have been at best half assed.
I read the internet for the articles.
Firewire is a physical transport layer for SCSI[*] which has been around for a very long time. The rub is simply the lack of drives with a native firewire interface. Everything I've ever seen contains a IDE/1394 bridge.
Firewire is a more generalized interface -- storage, video, communications, etc. Where Serial ATA is (at the moment) 100% focused on storage. This is where the current bloody ATA mess comes from (IDE was engineered for hard drives and then people started plugging other crap on the chain.)
* Technically, ATA is a physical transport for SCSI too. It's just in a red-headed, bastard, step-child fashion.
how are the Case modding geeks going to separate themselves from the rest of the mortal PC geeks if they can't be the only ones to have those neat rounded IDE cables and everybody has practical Serial ATA ones?
Seriously, I think that this will clear up so much space in the case that modding will gain a whole new element.
I can just picture a Desk with the PC integrated wholly into it, without the limitations on the IDE cables being so close to the controller cards the parts can be spread out much more, into more ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing PC designs...
I personally just want an external serial ATA adapter so I can just use a "Standard" hard drive for transporting data vs the USB ones or Optical media.
wordtrip.com
I know I'll someday break down and buy serial ATA, just like I borke down and bought into ATA. But it's still a waste of effort, probably designed to artificially fragment the market so that there will be a low end and a high end.
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