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!"

Comments

Performance? That's not why I want it...

[MartyJG]

I'm not so much interested in the performance advantages of S-ATA, rather the fact that it finally kills off ribbon cables. It must be the most limiting factor inside any desktop PC. In my tower I have trouble making even long cables reach drives at the top of the case, so they have to be mounted halfway down. In my Shuttle XPC the cables are shorter, but even they have to be 'rounded' and routed around clips to reach the combo drive without taking up all the space inside. Other people complain about the airflow restrictions several ribbon cables cause inside a machine.

In short, I don't care that (Gen-1) S-ATA starts at 150mb transfer instead of 'older' 133mb. I care that it makes building a PC easier, more space inside future barebones machines and PC manufacturers can use more interesting cases than the usual rectangular stuff. I'm excited about the possibilities it offers right now.

Re:Performance? That's not why I want it...

[b1t r0t]

It must be the most limiting factor inside any desktop PC. In my tower I have trouble making even long cables reach drives at the top of the case, so they have to be mounted halfway down.

You really ought to look inside the case of a current PowerMac tower sometime, just to see how unobtrusive ribbon cables can be, if some though it put into the case design. They've done an amazing job of designing the thing to keep ribbon cables out of the way. Even the otherwise horrible 8100 case design of years ago had good cable routing.

New power connector?

[Pastey]

This is the first review I've seen of the new SATA drives that made mention of this.

Anyone know why this was implemented? The article (now /.'ed) doesn't explain the reasoning, just that it exists. Why get rid of the old MOLEX? Since an adapter is included with the drive it doesn't seem that there are any new voltages required. What's the deal?

Is this just another one of those PITA upgrades?

??? Well... I don't know about that.

[Ayanami Rei]

And IEEE1394 is just serial SCSI, so why bother with that technology, just buy Ultra-LVD SCSI drives, operators are available right now.

The point is serial ATA is a simple ATA-style replacement. The drives will be cheap because the controllers will be cheap.

Firewire (or SCSI) are not cheap. They are not an equivalent product. Sure, it's BETTER, but it comes at a price some are not willing to pay for an desktop, MP3 server or what have you.