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."

Comments

Thats good and all...

[Viceice]

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.

Step in the right direction.

[Jacek Poplawski]

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?

Re:Step in the right direction.

[chrispl]

I have a Shuttle XPC SN85G4V2 with an Athlon64 processor and a nice fast SATA drive. The designers dropped the floppy drive for memory card readers, which so far has worked just fine for me. Its small (comes with a handy carrying bag!), very quiet and powerful. Runs 64-bit Suse 9.1 perfectly and I can switch over and play Doom3 in high res.

The only complaint I have is that the internal (USB) wifi card is not working under linux. A good PCI adapter remedied that but took up the only PCI slot.

Re:Step in the right direction.

[Jacek Poplawski]

Pendrive is example of something better than floppies - more powerfull, faster, easier to handle. And cheaper if you calculate price/capacity factor.

And I disagree about CDRW. You can use floppy in every PC, you can't use CDRW in every PC, because most have not CD-writer installed. Pendrive requires only USB port - which is in every PC. And it is not just theory - before I bought pendrive I was using floppies - not CDRW.

Noisy computer should be used when high power is needed. Noisy computer should not be standard. Today - it is.

Fast CPU generate more heat, but current fast CPU and two-years-ago fast-CPU are using similiar fans. Acceptable level of heat output, noise, mass and size is just set too high.

Uh, hello? Is anybody out there?

[marcus]

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.

Re:Isn't SATA small enough?

[base_chakra]

I assume that by "use smaller connectors", they meant that SATA is smaller than the connectors currently being used in mini hard drives.

I interpreted it differently. The article is about supporting miniature hard drives in consumer electronics devices. For that purpose, even SATA's connectors, small as they are, are rather large when you're trying to fit everything into a palm-sized device.

Re:What???

[Cyberax]

The problem is hard drives in miniature devices. Hard drives will never be as reliable as solid-state drives, mechanical drives also consume lots of energy (and that's crucial for small devices).