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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.'"
The author then goes on to note that the 'roadmap' calls for the 2006 version to run at 600mb/s, which fits nicely with my roadmap to world domination in 2005. ...Ummmm, yeah, we'll see.
Although looking at the list of upcoming products and the manufactures making them, I don't doubt we'll all be useing this in a few years.
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For that matter, how long has the x86 architecture been defined? How many /. readers were even alive when the 8086 was released? I know I felt a few grey hairs pop out when a co-worker told me his first computer was a 286. Only superficial changes in computer architecture have happened during our lifetimes. The way we interact with computers is totally archaic, just like the way we interact with banks, cars, washing machines, and televisions is archaic. The world is dying for some clever person to come up with a way to make it just as easy to ask a machine to do something as it is to ask a person to do something.
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This sounds remarkably like the plugs we got for Rambus RDRAM: serial interface is better than parallel, first gen won't see real performance gains, stick with us kids, this is gonna be really good.
I see a decided lack of Sun, IBM, AMD, or HP listed in the adopters, which leads me to believe that this is much like the above. Sorry guys, I'm not riding the first wave of any new tech on my salary. I'll sit on the sidelines for awhile and see how this pans out.
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>I would like to say that the price of SCSI drives is not 10x more because nobody wants a SCSI drive, but because they are simply more complicated to manufacture and interface.
That was true in 1980. It isn't now. I mean, it costs no more to build a RAID card (witness Promise Ultra Hack) than it does to build an IDE card, and that's massively more complicated than SCSI.
In fact, since all the smarts are moved onto the controller (which is dead simple to make today -- I bought a cheap one for $35 CDN two years ago -- it was cheaper than a cheap IDE card!) the drive itself is less complicated.
>Also, the preformance hit you take going from 7200rpm SCSI to 7200rpm IDE is not noticable at most times, but I suppose i am tolerant because i can wait more than 3 ms seek.
Agreed, but there's more to it than that. IDE requires new interfaces every drive (unless you want to take the horrible performance hit master/slave arrangements incurr). SCSI doesn't. IDE cables can only be 18". SCSI can be quite a bit longer. IDE only works for hard drives and CD-ROMS (and one or two other things). SCSI is for anything. There's more reasons than this to support SCSI over IDE (at the same price), but I think these three would be enough to sway users at the right price.
>SCSI is loud and hot and expencive, just like all preformance computing componants, and thus will never be a consumer standard.
Only because no manufacturer thinks there's a good market if they slap a SCSI controller on their current consumer hard drives. I think there is, and I'd be game to buy one, if they existed, for my next upgrade.
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It's real simple, ribbon cables SUCK, they cost more to make then serial so PC makers hate them.
So, here's how it is...
Fibre Channel - 2Mb/s(10Mb coming very soon), 126 drives, 10+ mile range, better then SCSI.
S-ATA - 1.2Mb/s(2.4Mb in 2004), 18" range?, IDE protocols for all your write-only data needs.
S-ATA is the Ghetto FibreChannel, just like IDE is crappy SCSI, expect similar suckiness and low quality to go with the low price and cheaper cables (to make, to buy they will cost more I'm sure).
But again, this is all about the creaper cables, since lets face it 95%+ of the machines out there only have one drive anyway.
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