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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."
Good. you can post the part of an article that refers to part of a previous article, completely irrelevant to the current one.
For your next trick, try posting comments about Win3.11 when the review of the next Windows appears.
Also, make sure when Mac OSX Panther comes out that you refer to disappointments with System 7.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I know how you feel. I purchased a Duron 1100 just last year, and now AMD have brought out the AthlonXP 2100+! They should provide a new motherboard and CPU cheap, as I recently purchased what is now obsolete technology. I mean, its only fair, isn't it?
There's probably a PCI card out already, if not there will be soon, so yes the xserve will be able to handle SATA in time if not already.
What I want to know is why you would expect anyone other than yourself to pay for it?. You obviously wanted xserves, so you got xserves and you paid for xserves. Is there some hidden part of the sale contract that makes you believe you're entitled to cheap future tech?
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
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
Er, what did they expect ? Internally, the IDE DiamondMax Plus 9 is identical to the SATA one. There's obviously not gonna be any performance difference between a pair of the same drives !
You can't speed a drive up by changing the interface. If they ripped out the IDE electronics, and replaced em with SCSI, it would still be a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, and would still perform exactly the same.
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.
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?
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......
Yes, manufacturers should stop coming out with new stuff, it only makes people who bought stuff last week feel bad.
Either that, or they should provide a roadmap of all technologies they plan on releasing for the next 10 years, with a timetable.
Oh yeah, and be sure to include that schedule for unscheduled downtime and natural disasters. CNN might want a copy.
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.
Assuming normal use (ie, non-RAID, one device), then master-slave/peer-to-peer makes no difference to performance, for obvious reasons. The physical discs themselves are the limiter - the interface has nothing to do with it.
A Drive to drive copy will be much faster with scsi than with IDE or SATA.
How do you figure that out ?
If the two physical drives can sustain 50MB/s, then your "drive to drive copy" is never gonna exceed 50MB/s. You've got 133MB/s to spare on the IDE bus, so your pair of drives aren't being limited by the interface (50MB/s read, 50MB/s write, leaves 33MB/s for overheads).
WRONG!
Quite.
I suggest you go and do some research. There certainly are areas where SCSI performs *much* better than IDE, but you don't seem to know about them.
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
SCSI drives perform better because they are different drives, it is not simply because they are SCSI. Most current drives have a sustainable drive read rate of 48MBps, which is far under the 133. And I imagine, that in a drive to drive copy on the same system you will be limited on the write speed of a drive which is much slower than its read speed. SCSI drives are often faster because they are 10,000 or 15,000 RPM drives, as apposed to 7500 RPM drives. They are physically different drives. And why are you assuming he has them in a master dumb slave combination, most computer users take advantage of IDE raid these days. And why on earth would you be doing a drive to drive copy with SCSI, if you have SCSI wouldn't you have them in RAID 0,1,5 ? In which case you can't do a drive to drive copy because the computer sees the multiple drives as one drive? I am glad you posted under anonymous coward, I wouldn't have put my name on that post either.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> Not too cheap for a 36 GB ATA drive...
I think it's the only drive of it's class around and should be compared to 10,000 RPM SCSI drives rather than ATA drives. I can't find any other 10,000 RPM Serial ATA drives anywhere... The price is probably loaded because of it's uniqueness - it'll go down with time I'm sure. Besides - if it's fast enough that you no longer need to buy a RAID array to edit your video - then you'll have made a saving.
Nick...
"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.
Check froogle for WD360GD.. I see one for 149.94 + $7 S+H.
-palp
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.
Had the system on for 48 hours now doing video renders - not a glitch.
Those baracudas run extreemley hot, but they have been very quiet.
KateKarnage - Goth, Geek, Not all there......
RAID 1 is the way to go for you obviously. Dont worry about performance. With RAID 0 you get double read/write but with RAID 1 you still get the double read speed. Since you can record at a set needed amount ot bandwidth your write speed should be fine. What you really need is what you have, safety and read speed. The time you really need speed is in editing a file, loading it up with an editing program can take a long time so i think you made the right choice.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Well this only matters if your drive is native SCSI. If you put a regular old IDE drive on a SCSI bus it would perform the same. The differance is that SCSI drives are expected to be better so are made with higher quality drive parts. The actual disc to buffer rate is better than that of IDE. But you are mostly correct about the interface not mattering. The gain made from say ATA100 to ATA133 is small because of how it REALLY works. The gain made is not tranfering a whole 133 mb's a second. The differance is made when you are trying to transfer at maximum speed for say 1/8th of a second. The drive that can transfer about 4 mb's a second faster (ATA133) will empty out the buffer faster but in the end even the ATA100 drive will catch up in large I/O's. So really the interface IS noteworthy but if you want speed get SCSI or an 8mb buffer drive.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I think the double read speed is going to depend on the implimentation of the RAID controller (I'm still not sure how good these low cost ata-raid controllers are - having spent most of my working life with enterprise class SCSI systems)
Thanks for reminding me about potential double read speed - I'll be benchmarking that to check out the controller.
As I said - the main reason I chose RAID 1 is I used to have a SCSI U2W card in the machine, and used SCSI 10k drives, I've lost 3 of them (from a variety of manufacturers) - even when being careful with cooling and so on, so, when I can effectively replace 1 SCSI drive with 2 SATA drives in a mirror for a similar price, and still have more storage than the allegedly more reliable SCSI drives. If these go well, then I definately think I'll be getting another SATA RAID controller, and just keep adding pairs of drives.
So.. another convert from SCSI...
KateKarnage - Goth, Geek, Not all there......
Well my main point was that although i prefer ATA drives over SCSI anyday (sooooo much cheaper its almost throwing away money on SCSI), SCSI will still end up being faster. Because of the differance in the actual drives that are built for SCSI they can do many things better which no matter how quick your ATA bus is SCSI can still win. Personally im getting ready to buy some nice SATA drives in a RAID for my personal computer as soon as i can (as soon as i can get a job that is :)). I like the idea of having so much space on the bus i dont need to take out drives but as you said simple keep adding pairs.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.