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Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Drive Reviewed
Mike Parsons writes "Andrew and Adam over at Explosive Labs have a nice review up on the Seagate Barracuda V, one of the first production Serial ATA drives. Keep in mind, Generation 1 of Serial ATA was not meant to be a 'incredible performance jump.' Rather, its intended purpose was to make the industry transition seamless to allow time to mature the future generations of SATA. Generation 2 and 3 of SATA show more promise for those interested in performance, as white papers behind them gives you the nice fuzzy feeling for speed!"
I couldn't find out nowhere answers to this 2 questions:
;-)
- does ALL SATA adapters + disks supports hotswap?
- does SATA under Linux support hotswap?
And yes, I know www.serialata.org
OK, I'm not a luddite, I understand that progress is a Good Thing (TM) but am I the only one getting dizzy at the speed at which the hard disk drive industry seems to be moving?
In the last five years, typical hard disk drive sizes have increased more than ten-fold, transfer speeds have shot up too and prices have come right down.
The net effect of all these factors is that HDDs have now become commodities and many manufacturers - put off by both the shrinking profit margins available and the high investment costs of developing the next generation of drives - have left the business.
There are now only four major players left, and all of them are doing whatever they can to maintain profitability. Cranking up volume only works so far - there are only so many customers out there, especially in today's economy - so manufacturers have looked to cut costs elsewhere.
Two critical areas that seem to have taken a major hit are quality control and warranties. More and more drives (and in some cases, entire drive families) seem to be failing at every given opportunity. Meanwhile, the length for which they're covered has shrunk back from (typically) three years to the minimum one.
Sure, at the high-end, speed will always be appreciated, but how many of us run render farms?
The market is near-saturated (not everyone needs 200GB or even 20GB, because not everyone is a MP3/MPEG/whatever addict) and that situation isn't going to change any time soon.
I would be much happier with an industry that still has some real competition and offers customers reliable, well-supported products in five years time than one that has breakneck-speed products from top to bottom but which break down every five minutes.
For 99% of users, data integrity is the holy grail and everything else comes a distant second. I wish manufacturers would remember that.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Firewire. IEEE1394.
You can get Firewire hard drives right now. You don't have to wait for them. You can get Firewire enabled motherboards right now, too. Nice round, thin cables. Nice hotpluggable connectors. Faster transfer speeds (Firewire2 will leave SATA in the dust).
> 15-Pin Power Connector? What's all that about then?
That's what I thought, too, when I first saw the new connectors. It seems we're trading huge data and slim power connectors for slim data and huge power connectors. Why didn't they take this opportunity to move entirely to 5V drives, just like notebook drives, and have a single power connector? Yeah, they'd have to design entirely new drives rather than just slapping on new drive electronics, but it took long enough even as it is, so they might as well have.
> why new?
Hot-swap. The ground connectors are longer than the power connectors. This grounds the drive's electronics before power is applied - prevents potential differences from destroying delicate parts.
> why not old Molex?
Friction-fit Molex power connectors suck. Just ask anyone who has used one more than 5 times.
The new SATA power and data connectors allow the drive to be hot-swapped with a minimum of extras. The drives can be slid into protective cases or hot-swapped bare - a vast improvement over the bulky boxes required for current parallel IDE drives to achieve even warm-swapping.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Find me one disk that can push more than 40-50MB/sec and I'll give you a cookie.
So, Serial ATA would be faster, if the disks were faster.
Karnal
I'm playing with my first two SATA drives, and one thing I find very careless is that the connectors are very easy to knock off the drives. This is not a problem for me as I am designing a RAID box where they slide in, but for a PC, somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt. By the way, my IBM SATA drives have the conventional Molex 4 pin power connector for legacy PC applications which you can use instead of the SATA power connector. Seagate was too lazy to put one on their drive, or maybe they need the 3.3V input on the SATA power connector which is not provided for on the Molex connector which is only 5V/12V. Oh, and one other thing, SATA 2.0 phase 2 which will be 300 MB/s won't help at all with performance until and unless the drives go past their present 50 MB/s native transfer rate. Hell, the 150 vs 133 vs 100 agrument of SATA vs PATA is silly when you consider the modest speed requirements of the drives being built today. Raw transfer rate only appears to be increasing 25% per year anyway, so it will be years before we even give a damn about the 150 MB/s "limit".
...rapidly, all of a sudden there won't be any any "legacy" IDE ATA100 or 133 drives available and all there will be is SATA drives with mandatory hardware DRM built in.