Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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-)
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?
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
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 Journal
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
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.