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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.
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
For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?
Even 52x CD burning is only 7,800 kb/sec. I can see where a SATA drive would be helpful for high speed DVD burning, but even then, if they even developed an ATA-133 model, that should suffice for a number of years.
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.
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.
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.
Rounded IDE is a hack. the length of the cable is even more limited than normal because of increased cross talk (interference between signal wires). Also, in my experieince, the rounded cables are even less flexible than the ribbons.
SATA can go longer distances, at faster speeds, with less bulk, more routing flexiblity & it works for all drives (PATA is too big for 2.5" drives). Additional it's electrically safe for hotplugging. As a bonus we finally get rid of those damn molex connectors.
At the moment it's more expensive, that will change.
Where SATA will of most use is in compact form factor machines - mini/nano-itx, micro-atx, laptops, high density rackmount storage servers etc.
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