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Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned
Lord_Slepnir writes "Cnet is reporting on a consortium of companies that wish to develop a Serial ATA hard drive interface for Miniature hard drives called CE-ATA. The goal of these new drives would be to cut power consumption and use smaller connectors, not to provide an increase in speed. 'The purpose is to design a new interface tailored to the consumer electronics and handheld gadget segment,' said Intel's principal engineer for CE-ATA, Knut Grimsrud. The consortium consists of Intel, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor, Seagate Technology, and Toshiba America Information Systems."
Even MORE devices with unreliable hard drives? Oh my God....
Surely there's a limit as to how small you want everything? WIth mobile phones now being credit card sized, isn't there a limit when it's too expensive and time-consuming to make already-small things even smaller for the expected returns? Or is it just a case of "mine is smaller than yours!"?
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
What, no reference to uses with the iPod?
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Why not just use the present SATA connector? It's already small enough for a credit card hdd. I'd guess maybe the strange SATA power connector is a bit big but that never stopped anyone. How many SATA drives used molex connectors instead? So no big deal! I don't see why we need yet another standard; it's bad enough to see SATA2 and SAS coming down the pipe already. (Let SCSI die the death it deserves! It never ceases to amaze me how such a simple protocol became such a monstrously complex one over the years.)
At the end of the day the hdd size and power usage is limited more by the drive itself than the dang connector!
But what about designing laptop HDD's that can keep up with desktop HDDs?
Nowadays, one can buy a desktop replacment laptop that has got everything, Desktop processor, upwars of a gig of ram, DVD-RW the works. Yet, the HDD is as slow as molasses in febuary.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
that should be SE-ATA, CE-ATA refers to cerial-ATA, an effort to make harddisks out of old bread crumbs..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
It would be a good point to note that only the more recent releases of the Linux kernel suport Serial ATA.
I recently assembled a PC with a IBM-Hitachi Deskstar SATA hard drive and Redhat 9 would not recognize it. I then downloaded SUSE Personal edition 9.1 and I had no problems installing SUSE Linux. However, I need a Linux distro with more bundled software than what the SUSE personal edition provides. As I post this note, I'm downloading Fedora Core-2. I hope that Fedora Core-2 recognizes my SATA drive.
I found very little information regarding Linux SATA support on the web. I also posted some questions to comp.os.linux.redhat and got no replies.
It would be nice to know which sites offer up information on Linux SATA support and more important which distros support SATA "out of the box".
Face it - PC is huge, noisy and heavy.
Compare PC with DVD player, digital camera or palmtop. Why the hell everything can be small, silent and light, and PC just can't?
Smaller mainboard?
Fanless CPU?
Micro hard drive?
Pendrive instead box of floppies?
Let's just hope... Because currently I have just pendrive. And I would pay for small mainboard with fanless cpu, just give me system with speed like now (Athlon XP 1800) and do not set price 3x higher.
I know that I can buy VIA C3, but it is too slow for me. Can I buy Transmeta CPU for PC?
Who has heard of USB 2?
Firewire?
Both are plenty fast.
Both have small connectors.
Both have power over the link.
Both are already supported just about everywhere.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Now I will be able to listen to the songs on my Rev.E iPod at triple-speed !
Although I suppose if Apple ever delivers the promised feature of having your Mac OSX Home directory on an iPod, this will be a very useful feature. (Apparently this was ditched as current iPod hard drives can't hack the stress of continuous desktop-style drive access)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Currently sata does not really 'magically' voodoorise your device and makes it faster. It is really just a neater cabling.
In fact, early drives are actually PATA drives with a PATA>SATA bridge chip patched on so that they can work with the new interface, nothing more and nothing less.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
The biggest problem with SATA is that they don't run power through the same connector. Thus, every drive gets two connections -- one to the motherboard and one to the power supply. That increases assembly time, the number of connections, the number of cables, and cost. The SATA group botched that big-time. Had they brought power through the connector, the power supply could have had just one connector which went to the motherboard and all SATA peripherals would get power through the motherboard. This has the additional advantage of allowing motherboard manufacturers to turn power on and off for each device while the system is running. Not only could the drives stop spinning, the motherboard could have powered them off.
and located in the front of the PC.
Why another drive interface when the ones in the iPod mini and Samsung's new SPH-V5400 phone seem adequate? Here's a clue: the new interface is meant to "address the major concerns of consumer electronics manufacturers", which I read as "DRM".
It'll be interesting to see what's in the interface spec.
See my post above "Uh, hello? Is anybody out there?" about loss of performance, increased costs and no ofsetting gains.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I read the other day, that these new hard drives will not have as much error checking as the bigger hard drives because the manufacturers expect that the applications will be music and video handheld devices and that it won't matter if the consumer gets a few dropped bits here and there....somebody should tell these idiots that copying microsoft's behaviour and that making crappy products is not the way to build future computer technological products (a salesman sleazeball probablly dreamed up that cheap idea), who can say what these mini hard drives will be used in anyway? We need to stop this major rush to the bottom in quality, from my own experience, my 40 gig maxtor D540X hard drive crashed (head arm brearing failed?), yet both my older, better quality Fujitsu hard drives keep chugging along, not to mention that I have had an expensive gigabyte motherboard fail after a few years..(I don't see TV's and VCR's failing at these rates so soon!!)...the thing is, once this attitude, that what the computer components get used for determin's their reliability gets into common use, then we are all doomed...it only take a few extra cents to manufacture slightly reliable components, its not like they are giving you this crap for free, you have to pay them good money for it (sounds like microsoft all over again!)
The same thing could happen with USB or FireWire. The drive manufacturer just needs to design some new silicon.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
IMHO these are all dying technologies. I think all the major corporations should be focusing on USB RAM drives. This IS going to be the drive of the future, its just a matter of time before the price points make it so its affordable.
No, the SATA connector is much too large. Do you have an SATA drive? The connector on the cable side is about an inch long. It's about 1/3rd the size of a 1.0" HD itself.
This connector will be far smaller.
I think you're all getting confused, because this isn't SATA. It isn't supposed to be SATA. The performance will be below that of the PATA and SATA. And it will have unified power and data.
This is for embedded devices, phones, mp3 players, etc. Those devices need a much smaller connector, and don't need 150MB/sec and the power that that consumes.
Because running power through the motherboard makes the motherboard larger and more expensive. Running 12V through there costs money and adds complexity. It also adds size. A 0.2" trace cuts a wide swatch. But in the end really, it adds an entire additional layer to the motherboard.
So the motherboard people don't want to do it, it would make their product more expensive. I doubt it will ever happen.
2.5" drives use less power, they also don't use 12V. Putting the power on the 2.5" connector makes sense since the power supply on a laptop is usually integrated into the motherboard anyway.
More power for the HD, or more power for the CPU. The hard constraints on a laptop, more than anything else, is power consumption and heat dissapation. If your hard drive is sucking down 9W to spin at 10krpm, vs 5.5W at 7200, 5.0W at 5400, and 4.5W at 4200, then you'll need to significantly upgrade your cooling system, or sacrifice 4W from the CPU or GPU.
Or accept an EVEN bigger desktop replacement.
GPL Deconstructed
hiz billness?
Or, is his cabal/cadge on the specs board, lying in wait to pounce anyone who defeats shorthorn's ahem, "new-fangled" "security features"?
What good would this technology be if in the future it is constrained to the INSIDE of computers? If external devices will be supported by an on-case connector, then doesn't that defang shorthorn?
Boy, bill and the cadge have to be hot and bothered every time new technology increasingly is less dependent on redmond for approval (especially the disruptive Tux and family and friends...).
seyS divaD
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I really hate that name and I think that they are thinking that the CE name is synonymous with portable. The name has nothing about serial in it!
The comment about 2.5" not using 12V related to my comment that putting in 12V would add another layer. Because 2.5" drives don't use 12V, you don't need to route 12V.
Trace size is mostly based upon amperage. Energy density does matter, but I don't know at what level it becomes a problem.
Anyway, I assure you your motherboard doesn't have a 12V layer right now. They use as few layers as possible to save money. Intel made the 865 chipset work with a 6-layer motherboard. You think 1 of those 6 was 12V? Guess again.
Additionally, you aren't just talking about putting power into the motherboard, you're talking about distribution through the motherboard. Why doesn't your motherboard already have 12V coming out to the drives? It has 12V going in at the power connector, check the ATX spec.
Why? Because powering 4 drives (or 6 on my mobo!) is a lot of power. Your power lost in the motherboard (turned into heat) is R * the current of 6 drives. This is why power supplies have multiple drive power cables to start with, and not just one strand with all the connectors on it in a row.
And your suggestion for budget system only makes sense if you accept that your proposal is a given. But it isn't. The current system costs even less than your proposed low-cost solution. That's why it'll be around for quite some time.
I suggested this to the SATA forum a few months back, I wonder when they started working on it. The crux of the problem is this:
Existing flash memory formats aren't fast enough, small enough, or standard enough. CF is fast and standard but the connector is bulky. XD is fast and small but nobody has XD slots on their desktop. SD is small but not too fast or standard. And of course the 44-pin laptop hard drive connector is downright huge compared to modern pocket devices. The advantage of all these memory formats is driverlessness.
USB, USB2, and Firewire suffer an opposite problem: The interfaces are standard and fast, and the connectors are small, and include a power supply. Trouble is, there's no physical form factor standard for USB keychain memory. You can't build a camera that'll securely nestle a USB keychain inside, because none of them are shaped the same. Teaching a portable device to control a USB mass storage device is also nontrivial, because being a USB host is a pain in the ass.
SATA could fill this gap, by defining a physical size and shape for devices to fit into. The devices are "dumb" in that they require no drivers, the interface is plenty fast enough for any portable device, and here's the key, so to speak: Desktops are already starting to include SATA ports up front, for external drive attachment. Being able to plug your portable's memory cartridge straight into your desktop, or your laptop, would be great.
Sony was one step away from this with the Memory Stick format, in that all their laptops started including MS slots soon after its release. They betamaxed the proprietary format for too long though, and it never gained wide adoption. Desktops don't have MS slots, and it's only Sony devices that use them anyway.
If I worked for a digital camera maker right now, I'd sidestep the whole mess by releasing my own line of USB memory keychains, perhaps in a marketing deal with Lexar or Sandisk. They'd be functionally identical to current designs, but physically shaped to fit into a recess in the camera. (Even better, I'd build my camera to accept the PQI IntelligentStick as native memory, and capitalize on the existing market base.)
It's small, it's fast, it provides power, and PQI is already selling the media. Desktops and laptops already include the port, so there are no readers to mess with. The physical size standard is all that's missing.
So how about it, manufacturers? Sign a deal with PQI that says they won't change the physical shape of their stick. Start building music players and cameras to take the format. (Ooh, good thing I looked it up before hitting Submit. PQI has this on their site: "Our I-Stick can go straight from your digital still camera, PDA, or MP3 player directly into the USB port on your laptop or workstation CPU.".... really? I'm not aware of any such devices that currently accomodate the stick. What am I missing?