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First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive
An anonymous reader writes "CD Freaks has a first look at a S-ATA optical storage drive. Although several S-ATA HD's have been released lately there have been no signs of S-ATA CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD+R drives. S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. However there seem still to be some compatibility issues. "
Poster didnt bother to look around. Plextor has some SATA DVD+RW love in the pipe:2 SA.htm
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/71
Text from the article:
Recently we have been given the opportunity to take a look at one of the first S-ATA drives that is under development. The drive we received was a test model and will probably never ever reach the market. It was still intresting to see this new development and we took the opportunity to make some early tests. From our tests it seems that current available S-ATA controllers are not yet ready to be used with optical storage drives and we expect that this will improve when more S-ATA chipsets will be released. S-ATA will be the follow up of the current ATAPI/IDE drives that have dominated the hard disk and optical storage market for years. The technology brings easier to attach and smaller cables, no more master/slave settings, theoretically more speed and hot swappability, meaning you can replace the drive will the computer is on. The coming time we will probably see more releases of S-ATA drives but expectations are that large OEM orders from the likes of Dell and HP will speed up the process of the development in the end of 2004. Market expectations are that the entire market will be S-ATA in 2007, according to our sources. Check out our first look here.
From the thread:
We came into posession of one of these "experimental" CDRW drives and thought it might be interesting to have a look at it and share our findings with the forum. Our best information at this time is that this drive will not be released any time soon. It was under development for a large OEM customer of LiteOn, who decided they were not interested in the drive. So if LiteOn does release it, it will be probably sometime in 2005. LiteOn does not have any firm plans at present for any other SATA drives that we know of. As long as there are IDE ports on motherboards, there's not much demand for this drive. So this drive is mainly just a novelty at this time. But it may give a clue or 2 about the direction we can expect CDRW to be headed. The drive's model number seems to be similar to the recently announced SOHR-5238S which is slated to replace the revered 52327S burner. However we have other info that suggests the 52A8S may have a different chipset than the 5238S. Untill we can open up a 5238S and look inside, we cannot know. The first thing that becomes obvious with this drive is that SATA controllers do not like it. Our source of info tells us that it seems to work very well with chipset-based SATA controllers, and not very well with PCI-based controllers. I have an onboard SIL-3112 controller (PCI-based) and also a SIIG PCI SATA controller card (also SIL-3112 chip). The drive will run on both of these controllers, but there are deffinite problems with firmware flashing and Kprobe scanning. I was able to flash firmware on the SIIG card, but not on the onboard controller. Kprobe causes the entire PCI bus to freeze up if you try to access the drive, not a pleasant experience. LTNFlash will read the firmware on either controller, but not write F/W except on the SIIG card. Whether these issues are due to drivers or BIOS on the controllers is anyone's guess. Another observation about the SIIG controller: Here's a reading curve at full speed on the SIIG card; What's interesting is that the drive did not actually slow down during this read, and the disc was a near-perfect CDR. So there appears to be some very strange bottleneck for data that is looking like a drive slow-down. Confirmed this oddity in DVDInfo: also, I was getting very high CPU usage readings on the SIIG card, running upwards of 40% but only in CDSPeed, not on my system monitor. So, I decided to put the drive on the onboard controller and here's the result: (much better) Again, this is the exact same SATA chip, with slightly different BIOS. I tried a number of different versions of drivers on the controller, even the driver form the SIIG card, but could not resolve the issues with the LiteOn utilities. I noted that on the OB controller, CPU usage is reported as normal, and burst rate measurement went from 8 on the SIIG card to 19 on the O
I punched a baby once.
Although I fully admit- starting MS Word will (Max CPU) kill a disk record before just raw HD access.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Ease up on their servers ;)
Shows all the pictures as well as text
cdfreaks
True, the bus speed increase isn't going to improve performance.
:-P
The main thing is cabling, and ease of installation. With PATA you have these big, wide cables, and you have to deal with master/slave issues (who hasn't experienced the "computer won't boot when you install a new drive problem, at least once).
With SATA it's not an issue.
Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers. I wanted to have a machine with no floppy (been the case on my Macs for YEARS) but I had to run to Fry's and pop for $9 so I could install the OS on a SATA drive
PATA and SATA are generally used inside the computer, USB/USB2 and Firewire are generally used externally (i.e. cable connected).
Not sure of all the details/exactly why, though PATA and SATA are both (significantly) faster than Firewire (even Firewire 800).
USB2 is 480 Mbit/sec, Firewire 800 is 800 Mbit/sec, PATA is 133 MByte/sec, SATA is 150 MByte/sec (so both nearly 2x Firewire 800).
SATA is a port, not a bus. You get one device per port, period. No more master/slave bullshit.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
if your drives have "burn-proof" you dont worry about that.
... 4 52X burners that can burn 4 discs at once without even a fart. SCSI is the source hard drives, andthe machine is pretty unuseable when the 4 disk burn is going (Except for when it asks for a disk in a driveto be changed for a new blank)
hell all but the absolute cheapest CDR's and DVD-r's have burn-proof in one form or antoher nowdays...
maybe that $29.00 Foogiatek 62X burn drive down the street might be suspect as to not have that capability.
I have on a SINGLE Pc at work with 2 ATA-100 connections to handle 4 drives
but I havent burned a coaster due to buffer underruns for over 5 years now....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why spend the money on a new drive (since we all know new technology always costs an arm, a leg, and your first born), when old you can adapt.
I've used a number of these things, and they work wonders for cable management. I have an MSI K8T Neo, and run exclusively SATA, with 1 SATA hard drive, 1 PATA hard drives, and 2 PATA optical drives, all through the SATA bus.
Another usable solution. But the speed and price of DVD-R now ($150 for the drive, $1.5 for the media) , it's cheaper to use DVD-R and get a nice sleeve, and back up much faster, than tape.
AFAIK, tape still runs at $1/gb, while DVD-R is now $0.20/gb
GPL Deconstructed
Hehe, why not use a solution that works, instead of wishing for a solution that doesn't exist?
Firewire hard drives are:
Mechanically compatible
Hot pluggable
Battery powered
Bus powered
Portable
Small
GPL Deconstructed
You should never had had any interest in buying anything from SiiG in the first place. Their drivers are abysmal, their documents are in engrish and frankly their hardware is craptacular to begin with. Avoid SiiG at all costs. I lost a 150GB stripe due to a driver error.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Forgeting the cost of drives (they are insignificant to the TCO on a datacenter backup solution) I can get Ultrim 2 tapes for about 60 bucks a pop for 200 gigs uncompressed with a streaming write speed of 30MB a sec or 100 GB an hour compared to 4gb in 8-10 minutes for an 8x DVD-R or 24 - 30GB and hour. The DVD's do get me random access and a sligtly cheaper media except for the volume (it's a 50 DVD Hatbox to store the same as one tape) I would say tape wins for a datacenter and optical at a normal 1-3PC home. That backup speed means a lot in a datacenter wich is why some places are moving to HD only backups and others to HD based buffering and some to a mixed format that provides the speed of HD based backups and the reliability of tape by running full backups out ot tape and buffering differentials only to disk.
No sir I dont like it.
The nature of Firewire is that it's not host-dependent like USB2.0 is. It's really a point-to-point daisy chained interface. You'll be much better off using Firewire in any situation for CPU utilization.
Because people compare published theoretical specifications like they actually mean something.
"Oh, look! SATA supports 150MB per second on each channel - Firewire is only 50MB. Drives on SATA must be faster!!"
Fucking retards. Ah, well...
Serial ATA connectors are horribly flimsy, since the "socket" goes into the "plug". I know because I recently ordered and commissioned a beautiful dual Xeon 2.8GHz server with two serial ATA drives. To get Linux onto it, I had to add an old-style parallel ATA drive just temporarily. When unplugging the extra drive, I accidentally snapped off the Serial ATA connector on one of the hot swap bays, and had to order a replacement connector PCB. At least it was a connector PCB and not the drive itself :-\
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A-ATA cables are about 3/8 to 1/2 of an inch wide and about 1/8th thick. you can twist the round and round without losing much length, and they do 90 degree turns easily. I got a new computer back in october with SATA, this is how I know. And the regular length S-ATA DATA cables are about half that of the P-ATA cables. Only thing is they need a power adapter in most computers since the plugs are different. Best thing about the ATA cables? Impossible to put them in backwards. I still have the problem of P-ATA cables going in the wrong way.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
SCSI Ultra-320 (320MB/sec) has been around for a few years.. I picked up a U160 controller and drives not too long ago for a reasonable price.. and holy crap is it faster than anything ATA has to offer, especially when you start talking about more than one device on a bus (ATA is a blocking bus, can't start operations on another device until the previous device has finished). Not to mention the 10k and 15krpm disks get helluva throughput.