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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."
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).
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.