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."

Comments

Seems like they say wait...

[3.5 stripes]

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.

More Information

[leibnizme]

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

Re:Why serial ATA?

[NomNet]

Out of curiosity, what is the point? Firewire presumably offers comparable performance doesn't it, or is there some compelling reason not to use it such as lower bandwidth or contention issues? And firewire seems to be a standard feature on an increasing number of PCs these days.

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 :)

Re:Why serial ATA?

[samael]

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.

Toms Hardware

[nmg196]

Toms Hardware also has posted a review of this Serial ATA drive.

Summary: "Extremely High Performance, Excessively Short Warranty Period"

Nick...

Re:Notes from the field...?

[KateKarnage]

Yes...

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' :) - 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.

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.

my understanding of the freezer trick

[diablobynight]

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.

Re:Just one question...

[SuiteSisterMary]

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?)

About ATA drives

[mr_stark]

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)
.