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Serial ATA, Here and Now
Xev writes "We have heard a lot about this new technology; over at HEXUS.net they have a review of a retail drive. The first on the internet, it is interesting to see the performance of the unit as well as the hotswap feature, and other new functions. Is this a solution to cheaper hot swap?"
Is it just me, or were the first several pages of this "article" written by cutting and pasting directly from Seagate's own product description and SATA white papers?
That they then split the article out over a zillion "pages" to pump up their ad impression numbers is insult on top of injury.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
We are having major server problems at the moment. Something is up - we will fix this ;)
Server bashing aside, how does serial ATA compare with SCSI as far as overhead, connection (daisy chain, bus, etc..)?
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I could be wrong though--wouldn't be the first time ;)
If they need a faster interface, what is wrong with SCSI?
Short answer, there isn't anything wrong.
I can see the benefits of the new cable design but don't see how the SATA architecture really benefits over SCSI.
Long answer, it's not supposed to replace SCSI, it's supposed to replace the current Parallel ATA technologies (for the record, fitting these IDE ribbon cables in smaller cases are a royal bitch!)
Whenever I've needed higher throughput on a high end desktop or server I just went out and put in an Adaptec SCSI card and SCSI drive.
That's awesome, but what about simple home computers who dont need the bells and whistles that SCSI offers, but rather something more comparable at a fraction of the cost.
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The new power connector is needed for hot-swap.
Tolerating failure and using a first release of something don't really go together. Best to wait a while and let others find out what does or doesn't work properly.
Of course, if they had over 4 paragraphs per page they wouldn't get hit as much.
But then they would lose advertising hits.
SCSI drives with comparable specs, right now, don't cost much more than IDE drives
Uh... right.
Which is why a 160 GB IDE drive is $205 and a 146 GB SCSI drive is $887. Ok, the SCSI drive is unquestionably faster -- for one thing it's 10k RPM, while the IDE is 7200. And you're right, SCSI command queueing and such make it better in large server situations.
In virtually every size the SCSI drives cost 2-3x as much. That's not "reasonable prices".
SATA bumps the price of the drive up by about $20 right now. That's normal with new technology, and once it's mass produced the price difference will disappear. And, actually, as the industry shifts to SATA the PATA drives will become more expensive due to economies of scale (yah, I know, the only difference is in the electronics. That used to be true of SCSI vs IDE as well, and yet the SCSI drives magically cost twice as much still).
Frankly, I've used both SCSI and ATA drives, and there's no way I'd ever go back to SCSI on a desktop system. The cost/benefit is simply not there. Modern ATA drives are not the godawful beasts of yesteryear, which sucked up massive amounts of CPU and were dog slow. All modern drives use DMA, so CPU usage is no more than 2-3%, pretty much the same as SCSI. The drives are rapidly approaching theoretical speed limits, and the main reason SCSI is faster is because they spin the platters faster. Command-queueing and reordering is nice, but it makes relatively little difference on the desktop. And while the whole master-slave thing does suck, SATA is getting away from that forever.
Don't get me wrong -- on a serious high end desktop (think medical imaging or CAD/CAM -- your gaming PC does not qualify) or any server I'd recommend SCSI still. And SATA isn't going to change that. But SCSI makes absolutely no sense on the desktop, and hasn't for nearly a decade now.