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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!"?
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."
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!
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?
Er, what do you mean? I switched to sata and it cut my load times by pretty much half globally - startup, games, everything. It's one of the most amazing upgrades I've done simply because there wasn't much of a downside to it. At ALL. With CPU there's heat and more fans, with my new gamer case case there was going out and having to buy longer cables, with sata there was just computery geeky goodness. Yum!
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
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
Even MORE devices with unreliable hard drives? Oh my God....
At the risk of feeding a troll, is this supposed to be a slam against SATA, miniature hard drives, or the 2.5" drives present in a very few early personal audio/multimedia players? What's the problem?
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
There probably is already a 12V layer in the motherboard.
So the motherboard people don't want to do it, it would make their product more expensive.
Motherboard manufacturers want to sell motherboards. Features sell to many markets. That's why my motherboard has two RAID controllers (on SATA and one ATA), gigabit ethernet, 10/100 ethernet, 8 USB ports, IEEE-1394, etc. If a motherboard manufacturer wanted to sell a bargain motherboard, they could create a cable why did a "Y" at the end and accepted a power supply hookup in one connector and hooked to the motherboard on the other.
2.5" drives use less power, they also don't use 12V.
Trace size is based on amperage, not wattage. 2.5" drives are also tighter on space than 3.5" drives, so they have to use smaller pins and tighter connector spacing.
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!
Flamebait my ass.
1 64 6203&tid=201&tid=109&tid=1
Maybe you ought to read:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/09/
and consider that ms will do just about ANYthing to make it painful for people to migrate to Linux/FOSS.
Making it PAINful for us includes:
--coercing OEMs into not supporting any os other than ms warez, except to a degree they might do some Mac work
--removing access to preview code
--delaying access to preview (competitive by timeliness) code
--upping the cost of access
Maybe it is YOU who is in need of the proximty suit?
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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?
Anyway, I assure you your motherboard doesn't have a 12V layer right now.
.25" trace on one edge of one layer to distribute the power to the drive connectors. It's not like you need to put the connectors in random places all over the motherboard.
So you throw a
Why doesn't your motherboard already have 12V coming out to the drives?
Because the spec doesn't require it. Why do you think that laptops provide +5V to the drives? Because the spec requires it.
Why? Because powering 4 drives (or 6 on my mobo!) is a lot of power.
All six SATA drives seeking at once would be about 6.5 amps. That's not a lot of power.
Your power lost in the motherboard (turned into heat) is R * the current of 6 drives.
When we have 2.4ghz Pentium 4 CPUs that draw 49.8 amps, it's hard for me to get excited about drives that draw about 1 amp (or 3 at startup).
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.
It's really so that the 12V at the first drive doesn't turn into 11.3V at the last drive. It's keeping the voltages the same throughout.
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.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. I don't believe that doubling the number of connectors and cables for each drive saves money in parts or labor, nor does it contribute to reliability.