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Serial ATA Technology Explained
Mike Parsons writes "Explosive Labs has an interesting article on Serial ATA . Here is a quote: 'In the rapidly moving computer industry, there are rarely the kinds of revolutionary changes like what is about to take place in secondary storage segment. Soon the hard drives and configuration methods that have existed since the origins of the personal computer will change forever. The basic IDE technology has been around for nearly twenty years. When the lifetimes of other computer components like CPUs and video are measured in months, twenty years ago seems like prehistory.'"
I doubt it will cost a lot extra. Perhaps initially in the order of $50 on a $200 disk, but I doubt it will go further.
The roadmap is interesting, but it's pointless to assume that the 600MB/s version would have surpassed SCSI in 2006. SCSI is today at 320MB/s levels and come very close to those transfer rates. Where SCSI will be in 2006 is something none of us know. In fact, we don't know if SATA will be a success at all at this point. Neither do we know that either of the two will still exist in 2006. Perhaps FCAL-3 would be cheap enough at that point and with idiot-proof connectors, that nobody would look back...
Where are we today?
* SCSI has much better seek times than IDE disks.
* IDE can transfer huge files at decent speeds, but CPU usage goes up significantly and doesn't come close to concurrent SCSI gear.
* IDE is cheap for storage, but if you're looking for performance, a nice IDE RAID card (3WARE Escalade 8500-4) and disks (Western Digital Caviar Special Edition) is expensive compared to an Adaptec 39320 and a Seagate Ultra320 disk. The IDE variant would require at least two, but probably four disks in a RAID 0 configuration to even come close to the SCSI performance.
* IDE is terrible at simultaneous access to lots of small files, compared to SCSI.
* While to some degree also true about SCSI, IDE disks use large caches to compensate for slow write speeds to the platter. IDE disks "cheat" and report back that the file has been written, when it may partly or entirely exist in cache at that moment. Hence unsuitable for reliable storage.
If SATA or any other standard produces a better performing product than today's SCSI, I will gladly switch. But as of right now, there is no such alternative. And for all intents and purposes, SATA is still not widely tested which SCSI is. In the case of several hundreds of dollars, I'd rather spend money on a devil I know than a devil I don't.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Ok I know you were trying to be funny... but here you go...
I am a HUGE scsi fanboy... My Dual processor lowly P-III866 still smokes the pants off of anything you can buy in the stores just because I have Ultra 160 SCSI drives in a raid 5 arrangement.. my linux and W2K boot times on this box make even a 2.4Ghz P4 machine look like a downright dog. why? because the hard drive is STILL the major bottleneck in a PC.. I do tons of video editing here so I need this mad-insane hdd access speed. (It also helps to have a fast-as-hell older machine at the lanparty's to knock the show-off's down a step... I really do love that! no winstone crap.... let's time out boot, ok let's time the start of UT2K3, ok why does UT2k3 look smoother on my machine? I only have a geforce2... hmmmm.. your' computer sucks if it cant outperform a P-III..... that is a blast!)
Cheap is good for low performance... and it has it's place.. SCSI is for those of us looking for reliability and speed... I will use NOTHING but scsi in servers, anything else is asking for trouble. and I only use SCSI for my perfoemance items... because I demand it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.