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The Coming of Serial ATA

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the faster-is-better dept.

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."

5 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. IEEE 1394? by bo-eric · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why not use 1394 for internal devices as well as external? Is it too bloated/expensive?

    --

    -- Free speech is only free if your time is worth nothing.
    1. Re:IEEE 1394? by mz001b · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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

      But a very important design point in serial ATA is that it is completely backwards compatible with parallel ATA. No software need change. This is not the case if we were to drop *ATA in favor of firewire. Now you can upgrade at your leasure, and mix and match (convertors exist to plug your old drives onto a serialATA cable).

  2. NAS.... by FuzzyMan45 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is going to be great for NAS applications and managing racks of drives. Ultrafast buses all to one and another. Great for network backup too. I havent looked at prices yet, but hopefuly it's not too expensive to implement in a home environment.

  3. hardly a new next step by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Sure an obvious evolution that we've been waiting for for a year, but nothing ground breaking or new. iSCSI has been hot in the news for a long time (yawn, nobody buying it yet that I've seen).

    So newer, faster, tastes more like real cheese. Disks are as unreliable as ever and are not close to following moore's law in speed up. Real use throughput (dd doesn't count) it still real uses. And its still 2 channels per card.

    Tom's HW isn't the most interesting/accurate site either: Revelations that serial can be faster than a com port!.
    /me looks at a fiber, a T3, USB (1 or 2), Firewire - hell, apple's ADB covers that. No revelations there except for the windows users.

    Oh yeah, that's the audience. It's like reading USA Today for news insight. It will leave you hungry.

  4. Nice number of IDE devices for the ABIT boards by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The IT7-MAX2 can therefore handle eight conventional IDE devices, as well as two serial ATA devices.

    10 IDE devices. This is what I want to see with serial ata, is more devices. 4 IDE isnt enough, at least with newer motherboards with built in raid/fast ata, you get 8, but if you want 1 per channel for the best possible speed it limits it to 4.

    Currently, I have 2 IDEs one on each fast ata on the mobo, and I get about 47 peak, and 34Meg sustained with IDE. Be nice when the 2 device on a channel is killed off.