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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."
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!"?
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That's what I thought when I saw iPod for the first time. And because of that I bought an MP3 CD player (well it was a lot cheaper too).
I've not heard of people complaining about the hard drive in their iPods. Battery, yes I know people have problems with batteries, but never hard drives. Makes me feel, like I've made the wrong choice... even though MP3 cd player is still fine 99% of the time.
I think a standart in small HDD interfaces is good, not only for iPod imitators (well the makers of), but also for people making mini-itx based computers.
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!
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".
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.
The same thing could happen with USB or FireWire. The drive manufacturer just needs to design some new silicon.
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