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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."
Now we just need harddisks that can sustain a 150Mb/s data-transfer rate.
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
serial cable to replace USB. oh wait...
Come on guys, that is one of the biggest details on the story
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.
The poster was wrong... SerialATA supports 150MB/s, not 150Mb/s.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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).
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.
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).
Err, yeah... I managed to get my Athlon XP installed and attached the heat-sink without crushing the core, but man was I unprepared for the hell that involved plugging in those IDE cables!
Damnit! Those basdards are always forcing us to upgrade! Change one part and you need a whole new motherboard! I have all these extra ISA alots and I can't use them? OK, so now I'm just being silly...
hit shift-reload in your browser. those are cached images
the direct linked ones do have hotlinking protection apparently
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.
Look at those benchmarks. If they can match a Parallel ATA drive with only 8 wires, imagine what they could do if they used as many as the parallel ATA drive.
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.
"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.