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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 guess I can now confirm that I have no interest in buying anything from SiiG.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
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
Since when have optical drives been needing more bandwidth than PATA can offer?? A friend of mine has TWO 52x cd burners setup on ATA 100, and can burn full speed on both of them simultaneously. So, um, how exactly do SATA optical drives solve anything? (note that I am all in favor of SATA opticals, if for no other reason than the cabling)
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?
Good example is DVD formats, DVD+R, -R, -RW, +RW, RAM (2x 4x 8x... I havent seen much development in 8x media, tho the drives have been out for about 4 months). In order for any format to survive, we need the pioneers to force the standard to be adapted, and only then can the industry move forward.
Hard Drives are the same way, I haven't seen any drive trying to change from the "standard" magnetic technology. Sure some are Trying different ideas, to reach that 1 terabyte drive and some trying holographic technology. (Story is dated back in 1996 -- http://www.businessweek.com/1996/16/b347193.htm)
People are relying on the Push of technology to drive their home computers, office computers, and Heck, most cars come with a better computer then what I am running.. So why not push all this new technology.
I think SATA-based optical drives will be a huge boon to people who build their own PCs, especially those who use AMD processors and/or overclock various elements of their systems.
The reduced cable clutter alone will improve airflow over RAM and around the drives themselves.
What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.
But, as with all new technology, we'll see how things turn out in the coming months. Hopefully, this will make an official appearance on the first x86-compatible mobos with PCI-Express slots.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
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.
Ease up on their servers ;)
Shows all the pictures as well as text
cdfreaks
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...
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
I wonder how much time will it takes for someone to come up with a S+ATA interface. ;)