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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. "
It has been a long time now without any major advancements in "easy" removable storage. Why has there not been a cheap and easily removable/transportable storage device with storage capacities that match the times on the market yet? There is a huge demand for something larger then 4 or 8 gigabytes, and the current optical storage we have now has been shown to be short lived.
I understand that something needs to replace ATAPI. It's done it's job well, but there are better technologies. But why wait for SATA when it seems there are already options available? If BIOS manufacturers would all allow booting from a Firewire device (do any currently) and MBs would all put Firewire onboard, it seems that things would be set. It allows for easy daischaining out of the box, it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does, and it's really fast. I didn't appreciate just how fast until I downloaded my music collection to my iPod. So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue? If so, what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?
SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.
Only SATA 2.0 will solve this problem, but it's still a couple of years away.
One word: Wirering.
The P-ATA cables are what? 4 inches wide and not very flexible (as in, you can't really make a good 90 turn across the cables width). Compare that to the S-ATA cables that are probably an inch wide, can be longer and are easier to place out of the way.
And they don't block airflow as much.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
A bit off topic, but I wish that the industry could settle on standard drawers for Hard Drives. Now that we have hot plugable hard drives with SATA, what we need is a standard drawer so one can take the drive and stick it in someone's else computer.
There are many IDE drawers out there on the market, but they are not mechanically compatible. Its a shame, because HDs could seriously replace floppies if we could just bring them along with us without worying about plugin them in.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Don't get me wrong, I love to see newer/faster/better, but I know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method for a device which barely uses the capability of the bus provided anyway.
Not all users are solely concerned with speed. I'd get it just to clean up the cables.
I end up using one optical drive per channel anyway, because I've found that I do get noticably better speed on optical-to-optical copies rather than making both drives share a channel.
My KHyperMedia 52x24x52x has "Seamless Link" or something like that, and while it was $39, the next week OfficeMax had it free after rebate.
Unfortunately, it appears to have a nasty habit of killing the secondary IDE channel (but not primary, even when plugged in as the only device), and then soon killing the i810's graphics on my Trigem Cognac (don't ask...) Another of the same model in the same order ON THE SAME MODEL OF BOARD didn't do that...
They've been working on making 1,8" SATA drives the next big thing in removable storage now for a looong time. The problem is not technical - SATA drives are hot-swap and trivial to create a mechanical enclosure for (something like floppies and zip-disks simply protecting the connectors from dust etc.)
The big reason it doesn't happen is that both the RIAA, MPAA, BSA and whatnot got their panties in a bunch over it. They're stalling for "Trusted Computing" to make these devices "trusted".
The reason? Harddrives are general purpose devicves. They will not be very successful in creating copy restrictions like the non-CDs and CSS DVDs. They won't be able to make special DRM-removable HDDs, so they're waiting for all HDDs to be DRM'd. Just you wait and see...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. Did we forget that CDs tend to explode when spun up faster than 56x? That seems like a bigger problem than not having enough bandwidth to transfer data...
sig.