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Serial ATA Drives Mature and Get Faster
MojoDog writes "Serial ATA drives are still as scarce as hen's teeth but what models are
trickling out from Seagate and Maxtor, are beginning to look promising.
This article and performance analysis shows the new DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA
Hard Drive putting up some impressive figures in standard SATA 150 and SATA 150 RAID
0 configurations."
Has anyone out there actually used serial ATA out there? Any stories, good/bad?
From the article: Our first look at a Serial ATA drive, quite frankly, was a little less than inspiring. That is to say that, even though the SATA 150 standard offers a higher bandwidth interface and those tidy, thin little cables, the performance of the first drive to hit our bench, a Seagate Barracuda V, was about on par with the average ATA100 or ATA133 drive on the market.
--------
Free your mind.
Any ideas if the xserve is upgradable to SATA? We've just bought 9 units late last year, and to see this tech out now is frustrating. I wish manufacturers could get their act together.
A cheap card with 4x SATA connections offered as a discount to people who've just recently bought ATA equipment wuld go down very well from vendors! Not likely I'll see it happen Grrrrr
One of the things I love about SATA is the simple clean wiring, but it's not something I see done very well in most case mods. Anyone seen images or sites related to making a truly minimal case inside? Hidden or extremely tidy floppy, CD, power and drive cables? I'd love to see how others have handled their tidy up jobs.
but scsi is old (lot of wires) and expensive.
Are IDE/S-ATA disks less reliable than SCSI on purpose (marketing) or only because we remember they were and think they still are ?
what models are trickling out from Seagate and Maxtor, are beginning to look promising.
The sound you can hear is the echo of the breaking of the hearts of ten thousand grammar nazis.
As the tech is still pretty new, and could use some tuning. Not too surprising, most new tech seems to follow ths path.
Does being an early adopter really have much benefit besides bragging rights?
I was planning on waiting anyhow, this just seems to confirm my original instincts.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
If you want to know more about the Serial ATA technology:
Cnet
SATA and ISCSI
Intel Dev Paper
Maxtor White Paper
Serial ATA Working Group
Writing "per say" does not imply ignorance "per se".
This may sound silly, but how cool would it be to have some kind of wireless cabling system for connection between all pc devices (like bluetooth) i know its totaly inpracticle, but u could have one of those cool induction charging matts with a motherboard, hard drive, cdrom, etc just sitting on it with no wires! very trippy 8-)
I once heard that the size of future computers will be limited by their component's connectors.
That said, I wonder if we will ever get to the point of performance where a drive can sit next to a computer and communicate via a (secure) wireless connection - either RF or IR (or ??).
Of course, then the above phrase will be that the size of future computers will be limited to their component's antennas.
Basically, I've *got* to find some way to get rid of the huge clump of cables under my desk!
Are IDE/S-ATA disks less reliable than SCSI on purpose (marketing) or only because we remember they were and think they still are ?
Can't say much for SCSI since they're so absurdly expensive per MB that I'd rather take a chance with my data than pay SCSI's going rates... But umm, yea... Modern IDE drives lose data. The most common problem isn't that they crash, it's that they end up with one or more inaccessable sector(s), you run the included recertification utility and it restores your drive to error-free status but it also *fucks up the filesystem in the process.
End result: Lost data.
With how often I've seen this happen with current 40GB, 80GB and 120GB drives, I'm beginning to think RAID isn't really a luxury anymore.
* I couldn't say fscks here, it might get taken in the wrong context.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Case in point: while stories of (distant future) storage technology consistently fill all the typical industry rags, a very real technique is already available and well-known to insiders. DVDA, one of the newer ideas that has taken off, promises to roughly quadruple conventional hard-medium storage techniques. Although more prone to tolerance faults because the scheme involves replacing the typical single-head approach with four carefully-positioned around the box, the increase in input capability has lead many to believe that consumer demand for DVDA will rise rapidly as it begins to hit the shelves in larger numbers.
We've all chuckled over the "640K is enough for anybody" quote, but the reverse approach of industry visionaries who predict teraflops of holographic storage or similar pie-in-the-sky schemes is similarly unlikely to lead us to tomorrow's breakthroughs. Don't be fooled into thinking that we've fully exploited the potential of current techniques.
Now that it looks like HD manuf. are getting SATA drives out the door. Does anyone know when we could expect to see optical drives out too?
Id love to see the end of all IDE cables in my computer. Im using a small form factor(sff) shuttle, and one of the problems with circulating air is the IDE cable. Also is there any plans/ideas about all the wires coming out of the PSU, as in any way to make those wires thinner and less obstrusive(sp?)
thanks for any and all responses.
later,
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
The one versus three year warranty is an interesting one. The trend of IDE manufacturers like Maxtor and Western Digital is to offer one year for "normal" IDE drives and three years for "Special Edition" (read: 8MB cache) drives. I'm not sure how this stacks up with SATA drives though.
Didn't drives used to come with a five year warranty ? Did I just make that up, or am I showing my age ?
Of course if, like me, you live in New Zealand, none of this makes any difference anyway. Under the consumer protection legislation here the seller of the drive must warrant it for the expected "useful life" of the drive, which is certainly longer than one year.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Now, I would welcome any replacement to conventional IDE / ATA which has been the bane of my life. I couldn't count the number of times I've had to screw around swapping cards and drives in order to accomodate that ribbon. I will be happy to see that particular technology go the way of the dodo.
Huh huh huh... in Finnish "perse" means ass.
-Kevin
For what it's worth, Ninnle linux was the first distro to supports DVDA
SCSI is only slightly more expensive than IDE. I will admit that, since it's so un-popular (for reasons beyond me) 99% of shops do not have inexpensive SCSI drives. But they are out there. Thanks to the internet, you can find some if you look hard enough.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
SCSI is more expensive mostly due to the ammount of QA done on the drives compared to IDE. Now that being said you can find reasonably priced drives on the internet granted nowhere close to the cheapness of IDE. SCSI still wins out due to protocal differences in a system with lots of random disk IO. SATA is nice but is realy still limited to drives built into the case and did they get hotswap built into that spec??? It's one thing to down a workstation to swap out a raid drive it's entirly another thing to shutdown a server to do so. Even with SCSI disks in an 18 month old datacenter the techs are swapping out failed HD's weekly but there are over 1000 servers on site.
No sir I dont like it.
Ok. It's nice to see new technologies getting out there for hooking drives up and making them lickety-split fast. But in the past year or two I've purchased 20something hard drives of various sizes from leading manufacturers and had AT LEAST one drive from each fail, if not two or more. This includes Quantum, IBM (who smartly got out of the business), Segate, Toshiba and others.
How about someone making a hard drive that isn't going to give up after a year? Or are these guys only in the business to sell me new hard drives after a year? Many are also reducing their warranties from 3 or 5 years to one year. Have they no faith in their own products?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
If you want to start an OT discussion why not use This?
Toms Hardware also has posted a review of this Serial ATA drive.
Summary: "Extremely High Performance, Excessively Short Warranty Period"
Nick...
5 year warranties, sigh. The good old days - actually I just got a 13 GB drive replaced by maxtor - refused to spin up, thankfully the freezer trick worked so I could get the data off it.
BTW, if anyone wants to explain the physics behind that, that would be really cool.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
SCSI is only slightly more expensive than IDE.
Typically you pay at least four times as much per GB if you buy SCSI instead of IDE.
inexpensive SCSI drives.
Though a massproduced SCSI drive should be possible at prices comparable to an IDE drive of the same size and speed, they are very rare. In fact I never saw one. So I guess a lot of people would be happy if you would tell us where they can be bought.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
they loved the drive and it smoked any and all ATA drives around. This is pretty cool for sure.
Yes they DID come with 5 year warranties.. and all my quality drives (SCSI) still do.
This SATA stuff is still a pipe dream until I see it available in the stores and easily bought.
Right now the SATA pci cards are overpriced, the cables are overpriced and you cant buy the drives.
Oh yay... I'll think about them in 18 months.
Freezer Gnomes. The same ones who make the ice disappear and food get freezer burn. The do wonders with gum in hair as well. Amazing little creatures if you ask me.
While induction might be a really convenient method to power devices, you'll have to be careful how powerful your magnetic field is. With magnetic devices like hard disks and floppy disks, you'll need to be careful not to corrupt your data.
I think it could make for really nice connectors, though. Especially in extreme environments, where dirt and grime are likely to get in between the contacts. You have something like teflon-coated springs, to serve as air-core inductors. This has the double-benefit of protecting against power surges, since air-core inductors can't really pass much of a large pulse of energy.
What's this Submit thingy do?
>1/10 for patriotism.
I resent that. I deserve no more than 0. Patriotism is for stupid fucks.
I bet 99% of computers does not even have one single SATA drive and it's MATURE already? Where are the beta testers, ummm I mean cutting edge users?
So instead of have to run a separate utility to screw up your filesystem by replacing bad blocks with good ones so there will be no indication that data was lost or corrupted, scsi will corrupt your files for you automatically.
Why is it called serial? As far as I can tell, only one drive can be connected per port on the motherboard. Why not "single" ATA? When it's called serial, I envision something like SCSI, with the ability to daisy-chain multiple drives.
No, I'm not trying to start another flamewar. IDE vs SCSI is an old argument. But one thing is certain: SCSI drives are much, much more reliable. They are designed for server use (24x7x365) and can be much faster. Get the Cheetah 15k.3 and you'll never look back!
Notice: You will pay for SCSI reliability.
...industry visionaries who predict teraflops of holographic storage...
Yes, I would have some doubt in visionaries who measure storage in floating point operations per second.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Sounded like an honest question. Yes we have started to test Serial drives, on a couple of the newer motherboards. I own a consulting company and we like to test all hardware before allowing any of out clients to deploy it. So we were running tests on the Seagate Barracuda series, as you well know is about the only drive we could get our hands on. For our motherboard we used a Abit KD7-S RAID. I happen to love Abit, but I have no data to prove this is the best board, I guess it's just a gut feeling. The install went easy, and yes, it freed up a lot of space in the computer, which may be an advantage to dual CPU people who have heat problems in their cases. Maybe in the future they'll make cases around the idea of having the heat output of the hard drive farther from the CPU because of the length available to serial ata. But if your looking for a big performance jump. I am terribly sorry. It is a very nice system, and runs fine, I will say, I had no troubles whatsoever and have added this box to my home network, and use it for encoding my home videos of my sons soccer tapes, 7 years of soccer, 15 games a year= lots and lots of divx encoding time. lol. But seriously, if your a gamer, or for that matter, just a performance computer enthusiast that is still concerned with cost, then get yourself a good ATA133 drive. For the cost of the drives and the larger drive sizes you can buy, I think it isn't worth it to make the jump to Serial ATA yet. But we have found something to use these Serial ATA drives for. I now have a small computer installed into the trunk of my TA and I run serial ATA and power to a mount I installed in my dash, where I now have a place that I can push in a Serial ATA drive to use in my in car DVD/MP3/Fuel control system computer. It's great, I can plug in an 80GB hard drive in my house, transfer all the divx movies, MP3s and whatever else I want for my week of commuting to and from the office, pop the drive out of my case at home, (I made it so I can slide it in/out of the face) and pop the drive in my dash in my car, and watch my divx's on my in dash LCD when I am sitting in high traffic. So this technology certainly has its advantages. even if it really isn't speed yet.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I'm waiting for quantum optical storage cubes. Solid state seems so crude. ;)
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I believe the freezer trick is designed for drives that are suffering bearing issues. In a lot of drives, their problem is that the bearings have gotten flat spots or other problems and as they heat up because of too much friction, they make it impossible for the drive to spin up. But when you put these drives in thefreezer you constrict the size of the bearings and reduce the temperature of the drive as a whole. It only works for a while, because eventually the bearings expand with heat, and cause too much friction again, and put the drive to a hault.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Who modded this offtopic? Apparently you haven't seen Orgazmo. Parent is right on target and damn funny! As long as you get the reference, that is.
SCSI drives can do drive to drive transfers if they are on a single cable.
In practice noone supports it.
Amusing you used the word `friend`, given that the US armed and financed him. So either way it's your fault.
Our Glorious Leaders George Bush II (All Hail!) will bring us riches beyond our dreams. All Hail the Great Leader George Bush II! ALL HAIL!
Microsft will sell you an wireless LCD screen.
The marketing goes somthing like
'be the first on the block to get a....'
and misses off, because when 10 people have them there ain't no bandwidth left.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Searching the WD site, I found the product page for the drive you are talking about, the "WD Raptor Enterprise Serial ATA Hard Drive 36.7 GB 10,000 RPM", a.k.a WD360GD.
Also, Pricewatch has a listing for the yet-to-be-shipped drive, with an E.T.A. of "end of March." Price: About $165. Not too cheap for a 36 GB ATA drive...
One trick I have used a few times over the years is the wrist twist. When I have a drive that is getting wonky and won't spin up I remove it and hold it in the palm of my hand with the axis of the spindle right about at the base of my palm. Grab the edges of the drive between fingers and thumb and, with a quick twist of the wrist, snap the drive around its spindle axis. It you do it quickly you can sometimes feel or hear the disk assembly move a bit inside.
.
This tends to get the drive past whatever dead spot is preventing the spin up - they have rarely failed to come up when I use this trick. Of course when it spins up you then quickly remove all data that has any meaning for you since if it did this once. .
No worries about fingers stuck to the frozen drive or about condensation.
Disclaimer:
Use this trick in moderation, not responsible for lost data, broken wrists/fingers, or errant "smart" bombs.
What Does ATA stand for?
ATA = AT Attachment
AT = Advanced Technology (as in IBM's first PC)
Basically the old IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and the later UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) drives are parallel ATA devices, that is data is sent over multiple 'lines' Serial ATA send data over 1 'line' but at a much faster rate.
In theory parallel transmission should be faster, more lines = more bandwidth but in practice serial connections are quicker as they don't suffer from cross talk and other complications (big cables - easily damaged)
.
I can't think of anything witty right now
During a PCWORLD article I read up on the difference between SATA and the PATA. While Serial was able to do better on searching and moving a bunch of smaller files. Parallel was still able to beat Serial in opening a single 1.7 gig file. And the difference in some cases was only by a few seconds. This, to me, doesn't want to make me change anytime soon. I don't see this coming into play for a few more years when they are able to make the transfer's faster for big files or they just decide to change it anyway and leave us in the dust..... Like dell and how they are getting rid of A drives.
Given the mobo manufacturers' tendency to leave legacy connectors on long after the need for them has all but disappeared, i.e. parallel & serial connectors, I suppose we'll still see PATA connectors on the mobo's for years.
Seriously. What's the point of SATA? One drive per channel. Yippee! There's a real step forward. Hell, you don't even have the option of sacrificing performance by hooking up two drives per channel. Want to set up a RAID? No more SCSI with it's single cable. If you've got 5 drives, you'll have 5 cables, each going from the drive to the controller. Yeah. That's a real clean setup. Don't want flat ribbon cables? THEN DON'T USE THEM. Round IDE cables have been available for years.
SATA doesn't solve anything.
I was looking at drives this weekend and saw a 60GB Maxtor. It was perhaps the last 3-year warranty drive I'll ever see, and the only one of its kind on the shelf, so naturally I snatched it up. All of the drives with newer packaging, including the 8MB cache drives, were labeled as having 1-year warranties. Truly sad.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of nine track tapes.....
SATA drive and controllerHmmm... looks like you can, and for almost the same price as ATA133.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
SATA is nice and all, but I have yet to find any software that will talk over it to do SMART diagnostics. So I have to plug my dying drive back in with the old IDE cables to figure out why it is dropping off my SATA RAID setup. Kinda sucks!
No... It's just that 4x cheaper IDE drives are easy to find.
Ah, I see. You must be an expert then.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why don't they just replace all the cables with optical fibre. This would mean each device is not limited by the cable but the chipsets.
"DVDA, one of the newer ideas that has taken off, promises to roughly quadruple conventional hard-medium storage techniques"
Note to Anonymous Coward:
Most Women refuse to do DVDA.
Look somewhere else for your "hard-medium storage" you sick bastard!
actually I'm suprised anyone sees bad sectors at all anymore, most drives electronics are so good they detect dead/dying spots before they effect data and use the spare sectors at the outside of the disk and just add an entry to the mapping table. Through SMART interface you can get a report of the number of remapped sectors, and if you are an oldtimer it gives your heart a little jump thinking about how much data would have been lost on an old drive without automatic re-mapping =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
then you can tell us where to get them.
If you are keep being the typical slashdot fatty
XServe RAID == badass
You just get one of those and run fiber channel to your XServes. A lot more bandwidth. If you bought 9 XServes, you could surely afford one 3U Fiber Channel IDE RAID box to feed them. These are sexier than the XServes themselves. You get full redundance everywhere, lots of bandwidth, and hot-swat capability.
"the OPs photo was one of a few spread around in the Iran/Iraq war"
e _east/28847 69.stm
Wrong, fuckhead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middl
It's from Basra.
You have that totally wrong.
SCSI Drives are more expensive because they are tested individually, because of VOLUME ISSUES, not because the tests are any more robust!
Makes no sense for a company to build a 100-drive-wide testing array for SCSI drives, because so many fewer are produced.
This drives up costs considerably.
+#if defined(__alpha__) && defined(CONFIG_PCI) /*
+
+ * The meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Plus
+ * this makes the year come out right.
+ */
+ year -= 42;
+#endif
-- From the patch for 1.3.2: (kernel/time.c), submitted by Marcus Meissner
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...