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Serial ATA Drives Mature and Get Faster

Posted by timothy on from the one-step-at-a-time dept.

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."

23 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Hidden wiring/tidiness by baryon351 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Hidden wiring/tidiness by jridley · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I was part owner of a clone building place once. We used to have informal contests to see who could build the neatest PC (using stock case/etc). We would clamp up custom flat cables (this was years ago, before the era of round cables), making them so that each connector was in exactly the right place, and facing the right way. We had what I thought was an innovative little feature; at the time it was almost standard to put in both 3.5 and 5.25" drives; so we put TWO controller connectors in, 1 inch apart, with a twist in between them; if you plugged on in, the 3.5" was A:, if you plugged the other in, the 5.25" was A:. We also clamped on an aux socket for the (then popular) floppy tape backup drive.

      We also did a lot of folding to make things lie flat (we called this "cablegami").

      If a setup had elements that proved easy enough to do, we incorporated them into our standard build. We got to the point where we were making custom cables for most one-off machines (the university's extremely-tightly-bid, low-low margin, 50-identical machines got stock cables).

      Even with the tech of the time, we got it pretty clean and hid a lot of the wires. Of course, we did this partially by running cables UNDER the mainboard. Also there were a lot of cable ties involved. The machines were super clean looking inside, but they were a bitch to upgrade.

      Also, obviously that was something that only worked because we were just 3 guys making machines in a small building; if we had to make 200 machines a day all that innovation never would have happened; we'd have been too busy to screw around with it.

  2. Re:Not that promissing... by castroja · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is that really surprising to you? The Cuda V is slow regardless of interface so of course it's not going to 'showcase' SATA any differently than if the drive is was an ATA100 interface. The improved cabling alone is worth negligable increases in performace for the time being.

  3. Bluetooth Wires! (or no wires) by creamandchives · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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-)

  4. Re:Seems like they say wait... by baryon351 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does being an early adopter really have much benefit besides bragging rights?

    Curiosity. Somewhat like nabbing and installing a beta copy of some software and checking out where it's at. If I had the cash and felt the satisfaction of my own curiosity was worth it, I'd have a few SATA drives running, just for the hell of it.

    It gives some geektypes something to talk about, ponder over, and throw opinions around on where stuff's heading.

    Then yes, there's bragging rights :)

    It's nothing too serious, really. People are people and some of us just like new stuff

  5. Slightly Off-Topic by epicstruggle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!"
  6. Re:Not that promising... by IanBevan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  7. Why serial ATA? by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.


    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.

    1. Re:Why serial ATA? by ed1park · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This reminds me...

      http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20020827/inde x. html

      A review of USB 2.0 and Firewire drives at Tom's site indicates that real world throughput is bottlenecked by the interface to about HALF the theoretical max.

      Why so slow? Is it all overhead? Poor optimization? Should we always assume that real world performance is approx half that of the theoretical max?

    2. Re:Why serial ATA? by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I think other responses explained the general reasons that serial ATA might be better than firewire but I thought I'd make one point. The absence of a driver in Linux is not a reason in itself to not adopt a technology. Linux gets a driver when there is a demand and motivation for such a driver. The emergence of snazzy firewire drives, camcorders etc. is exactly such a reason and will fuel development of such features. The same happened when USB first appeared.


      As far as I'm aware IEEE 1394 (firewire) is a readily available standard and assuming specific chipsets are documented there should be no barriers to making Linux talk happily with such devices. I'm no kernel engineer but I would guess that great big chunks of their bus / device abstraction are readily applicable to firewire too.

    3. Re:Why serial ATA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Err, maximum theoretical thoroughputs are about as meaningful as posting on Slashdot. Btw, FireWire 400 is now out of date. FireWire 800 is already on shipping products (having long ago been approved by the IEEE standards body). SerialATA only allows one device on the bus. One. That one hard drive of yours doesn't have a bat's chance in hell of saturating the bus. Optical drives are an even bigger waste due to S-ATA's architectural constraint. FireWire, on the other hand, lets you have more than 60 devices on the same bus talking in real time with quality of service guarantees (that's why it is used for A/V work). With FireWire you can actually use the bandwidth.

    4. Re:Why serial ATA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The absence of a driver in Linux is not a reason in itself to not adopt a technology

      How about the absence of a driver in Linux, NetWare, OS/2, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, SCO UNIX, DOS 6.22 ...

      A huge number (maybe even a majority) of new computers are shipped to customers using "legacy" operating systems. You can't just dump proven technology because Windows XP SP3 has a driver, especially when that tech is critical in the boot phase of the OS.

  8. solid state? by khuber · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'm still waiting for affordable solid state disks. Magnetic storage seems so crude.

    -Kevin

  9. Re:serial ATA rox! by silas_moeckel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  10. What about drive failures? by jspectre · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:What about drive failures? by nmg196 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      How about someone making a hard drive that isn't going to give up after a year?

      I think I have a solution for you - or rather Western Digital do. It's 10,000 RPM, 5.2ms average seek time, SerialATA 150, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and a 5 year warranty! With those stats, it should really fly if they've put some effort into the controller...

      It hasn't been released yet, but I'm going to wait and see what the reviews say before upgrading my machine - it looks good on paper.

      They have a press release here.

      Nick...
    2. Re:What about drive failures? by Surak · · Score: 3, Interesting
      From the article:


      Although clearly this is a high end product, the warranty from Maxtor for this type of drive is lack-luster. Maxtor only warranties the drive for 1 year, while many other high end desktop products, like the WD SE drive, sport 3 year warranties. We would like to urge Maxtor to reconsider upping the anti here. Clearly this is a well built product, there is no reason not to stand behind it for a longer duration
      /blockquote

      The reviewers clearly felt that the Maxtor SATA drive was well-built and that there was no reason that Maxtor SHOULDN'T stand behind it for longer.

      Personally, I think that hard drive manufacturers aren't standing behind their drives for longer for a few reasons. One is that margins are razor thin. You'll be able to pick up an 80GB Maxtor SATA-150 drive for $80-$125, once they begin to ship in quantity. Just a few years ago, the top-of-the-line ATA drives (whatever their size is is irrelevant..I'm talking line positioning here) were selling more than 3 times that price. Inflation has gone up, but technology has deflated in price quickly. (Personally, I'm waiting for them to come free in my box of Lucky Charms(TM). :-P) So if they have to warranty their drives for 3 years, they may not be able to stay in business.

      --
      My journal has hot /. gossip.
  11. Re:Not that promising... by loraksus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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'azsxdcfv gbhnjmk,l.;/
  12. Already? by imaniack · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  13. Get SCSI by spanky1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  14. Quicker than freezing by scatter_gather · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  15. Not much diffrence right now...... by Krizhek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  16. What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.