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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."
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?
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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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......
...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
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
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?)
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
> Get the Cheetah 15k.3 and you'll never look back!
Warning: Never put Seagate Cheetah drives where there are people. They sound like a circular saw trying to cut though a piece of reinforced concrete. Really not a very nice sound. At all.
Nick...
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