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. "

Comments

What is taking so long?

[supraxnet]

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.

Re:What is taking so long?

[aldoman]

Because of the enviroment. People don't scratch hard drives and expect them to work. However, you will be ridiculed as a conman if a few scratches hurt your optical media.

Also, people don't like caddies. We need an advancement in error correction before we can think of using even higher density optical media.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Ozric]

Or maybe pick up a cheap DLT drive on ebay.

I have personaly thrown DLT tapes across a datacenter, dropped them from high tape rails and kicked them across the drop floor. But they still work just fine. They are harty little buggers I am convencedd the only way to beak them is with a hammer or inceneration.

Why not Firewire?

[OG]

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?

Re:Compatability Issues

[Hektor_Troy]

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.

Standard drawers.

[deragon]

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.

Re:A solution??

[bhtooefr]

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...

Three letters: DRM

[Kjella]

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