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

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.

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?)