Serial ATA CD-Rom Drives?

OutRigged asks: "With Serial ATA hard drives starting to go mainstream, and being almost equal in price to their parallel equivalents, one would think we'd have Serial ATA CD-ROM drives by now. Yet wherever I look, all I see are PATA based CD-ROM drives. It's obvious that an optical drive will benefit little, if at all from using SATA, but why not switch for the sake of the cable size? CD-ROM drives are usually at the top of the case, and with the 1m limit in length, along with the small size of the cables, I see no reason not to use a Serial ATA interface in a CD-ROM drive."

Comments

New case standard needed

[Baron_Yam]

Damn, but I love it when you get a nice server, plug in those SCSI drives to a backplane mounted in the drive bay, and they all auto-address.

It'd be nice if hot-swappable RAID5 IDE (complete with LED status lights) was worked out as a new standard for the home PC - one cable to the drive bay board, then plug in your drives without worrying about jumpers. It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.

I wonder if economy of scale would make that affordable if all the next generation of PCs were sold that way?

Re:New case standard needed

[UserChrisCanter4]

Actually, I recall reading that they were considering shifting to 2.5" HDDs in the BTX standard. Note: This doesn't mean laptop Hard drives. Apparently, as rotational speeds have gotten higher, the size of the physical platters has shrunk in order to increase reliability (the force at the edge of the smaller platters is less at the same rotational speed). The 3.5" size simply exists now because it's a legacy standard, but they plan to phase down to 2.5" drives since it won't be an issue, space-wise.

As long as the extra space isn't crucial for reliability (although I don't know how we could get LESS reliable IDE drives), I'm all for the smaller space requirements and the accompanying case designs they will afford.

bridge chips

[uberhund2]

Most of the SATA hard drives are still just parallel ATA with a bridge chip to convert them to serial. I imagine that once manufacturers switch to native SATA hardware, the reduced costs will send SATA to CDs, DVDs, etc.

IDE will never die...

[Toxygen]

...just ask your friendly neighbourhood floppy drive.

Internal Firewire?

[NanoGator]

Do they make internal firewire drives?

I've never seen one, but I do have a card that'll do it. It has 4 ports going out the back, and one that's right on the card pointed towards the inside of the case.

Re:Internal Firewire?

[Paladin128]

SATA has a lot of advantages... the cables can be made cheaply, the standard form-factors of drives are designed to slide in/out of a backplane (which no one has made yet) and it has room for growth. The next gen version will support 300MB/s and splitting a channel into 15 other channels. There's also talk of an external version of the standard. Plus, it's largely backward compatible with ATA.

As for SAS (Serial attached SCSI), it has some nice features as well. First and foremost, it's backward compatible with SCSI and compatible with SATA. That means you can take an SATA drive and plug it into a SAS controller just fine. The inverse is not true; SAS drives won't work on SATA. This means if someone wants to make a common SAS backplane for a PC case, one can just slide in any SAS or SATA drive in any combination. Very cool, as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Internal Firewire?

[drinkypoo]

It'll be very cool if the SATA on SAS plan comes to fruition. However, the cheapness of SATA cables just isn't motivation, after all 1394 cables are four conductor. The only reason they're expensive now is that not too many companies are making them.

How is next gen SATA supposed to handle splitting a channel up like that? With some kind of hub?

There are external versions of SATA now, but I don't know any details. Obviously they're proprietary. Until drives are meant to be external, I'm still turned off of SATA. Of course, I don't use SCSI any more because it's too pricy (unless you want smaller drives, or want to deal with SCA adapters, or of course have an SCA backplane/enclosure) so I have ATA disks in my PC.