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Serial SCSI Standard Coming Soon
rchatterjee writes "SCSI is very close to joining ATA in leaving a parallel interface design behind in favor of serial one. Serial attached SCSI, as the standard will be known, is expected to be ratified sometime in the second quarter of this year according to this article at Computerworld. Hard drive manufacturers Seagate and Maxtor have already said that they will have drives conforming to the new standard shipping by the end of the year. The new standard will shatter the current SCSI throughput limit of 320 megabit/sec with a starting maximum throughput of 3 gigabit/sec. But before this thread turns into a SCSI fanboy vs. ATA fanboy flame war this other article states that Serial Attached SCSI will be compatible with SATA drives so you can have the best of both worlds."
320 megabytes is about 2.5 gigabits ... which is a lot closer to 3 gigabits than the erroneous 320 megabits figure.
To reduce crosstalk between the wires so that you can run at faster speeds. Indeed, the "rounded" IDE cables often reduce performance by 5% or so. We're getting better at data throughput though, so we can use serial technologies and actually get faster transfer rates. Good riddance to ribbon cables :P
>Why not simply roll the ribbons up into cables?
Impedance, crosstalk (mentioned) and price.
It takes seconds to crimp a ribbon cable. Cheap and easy. You can even do it yourself!
Taking a bunch of twisted pair wires (which is what would be required to keep the impedance and crosstalk bearable) and soldering them onto connectors individually takes a lot more effort, and therefore costs more.
Not to mention fabbing individual strands of insulated wire and twisting them together costs more than running 5 wires parallel to each other and simply coating them all at the same time with PVC.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I don't think so. The reason there is a tremendous push towards serial right now is because parallel interfaces create more interference at higher frequencies. The theory with serial is that you can push the frequency as high as you want without the interference.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Firewire is low end consumer product...even with its successor (which is taking longer than expected to ship) running at 800Mbits/s (100 Megabytes/second) it falls short of current SCSI technology running @ 320MB/s. As such there is no one who would seriously consider firewire for a large scale server handling many gigabytes/terabytes of data. Firewire is just too slow of a bus for big needs, but does fills its convenience needs in the consumer market. Everything has it's own niche... that's why heavily marked up servers/mainframes/supercomputers still exist instead of cheaper home machines which just can't fill the requirements.