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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."
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
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.
Given the power requirements of ever faster processors, I think you may see bigger, fatter power supply cables. The physics of wire size / current capacity are pretty well established. Unless room temp superconductors become a cheap reality, plan on a wad to power the MB.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
Firewire gives a maximum throughput of 400Mb/second (50MB/second), with future versions giving 800Mb/second (100MB/second). :)
SeialATA gives a maximum throughput of 150MB/second, with future versions giving 300MB/second and then 600MB/second.
SerialATA is MUCH faster. Now granted, modern Hard Drives can't get anywhere near 150MB/second, but one day they will
Firewire can be connected in a multitude of different ways, to different devices. It therefore needs a fairly complex protocol.
ATA can be connected in very few ways to only one controller. It therefore has a nice, simple protocol.
The simpler the protocol, the higher the throughput, because you're not having to send messages and wait for replies to work out where things are going.
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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...
Yes...
:) - I'm not expecting a massive performance increase, as the controller on the motherboard is a bridge to the existing ATA133 Controller IIRC, so although the drives may be communicating at 150, there's a bottleneck there, and anyway.
I put a pair of barracuda Vs in my rebuilt (WinXP) PC this weekend, as I was rebuilding anyway, and managed to get hold of a couple. I mainly use my PC for audio recording and editing.
Currently I have them in a RAID 1 conf as a mirrored data volume on an ASUS A7NX Delux & AthlonXP 2700+ (I do a lot of AV work for my band, and have had a few disks go down in the past 3 years, so I'm sacrificing the potential performance boost of RAID 0 for the piece of mind - I have plently of space anyhow.
First thoughts - well installation was easy, cable routing and tidying was MUCH easier - the only niggle being the power adapters adding another point of connector failure and more length to already long power cables. This has also allowed me to put my PATA DVD rom and DVD -R drive on seperate IDE channels.
So far, I haven't run any real benchmarks, apart from 'Well it all feels just as responsive as with PATA 133 drives'
Well, I left it doing a 24 hour set of video renders last night (partially as a burn-in test, partially because they needed doing) so I should see later if any major problems have shown up.
KateKarnage - Goth, Geek, Not all there......
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
I was trying to build a Raid-0 system using a 3ware board 8508, 1 Maxtor SATA drive, and 3 bridged PATA drives.
/ peripherals. html#idefw)
The stupid 15-pin power cable connector broke and the SATA then melted. Something shorted out or went to 0 volts and the SATA drive went hyper, turned red-hot and melted.
Because of voltage/current spikes I also lost the 3 PATA drives(they chatter now). I just replaced the power-supply because I think the power supply has been compromised.
Do not use the SATA power cables if you can, instead try to find a SATA Backplane.
(http://www.enhance-tech.com/products
In the days of yore, when you could send only a few bits per second down a wire, which is serial, it was noticed that you could lump eight wires side by side, send one part of a byte down each wire, and boom, you've got parallel. Like this:
Serial:
0
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
Parallel:
001100010
Now, however, they've noticed that our ability to send bits down a wire is so improved, you're actually wasting time by trying to synchronize between eight separate wires; it's faster to just blitz the 8 bits down one wire.
Hence, this new ATA is serial, whereas (E)IDE is parallel (those flat ribbon cables give it away nicely, don't they?)
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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
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!