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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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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.
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
Before answering, I'll point out that 2.5" ATA laptop hard drives have run power through the same cable with data for years with no serious problems.
At this point in time, it would be a BAD idea to supply power to the drives through the motherboard. For one thing, the motherboards would have to be able to handle the extra amount of current flowing through them.
That's a non-issue. All motherboards have a power layer and ground layer. Each layer is solid except for circles around the pins to which they don't connect. Huge amounts of current can pass through there. You can pass 3 amps at 12 volts through a distance of 10 inches using about a 0.2" wide trace. A SATA hard drive takes about 1.1 amps when operating and seeking and about 3 amps of startup current (though that could be mitigated by sequenced start-ups to prevent all drives from maxing out at once).
I think they might have problems as is supplying current to the Graphics card and CPU.
The CPU current isn't the issue. It's the heat that causes problems. On the graphic cards, it's the bus spec and connector that's the limiting factor. If you make an AGP card that exceeds the bus spec, then there will have to be an external power connector, but that doesn't mean that providing power through the motherboard is technically infeasible from a design standpoint.
Also, if you did do that, you run into two other issues with power as well. Heat dissapation in the cable and intereference with the data lines.
Do SATA power cables get hot now? Of course not. They won't get hot if fed from the motherboard either. Noticeable heat in a power cable is a sign that the wire is WAY too small. As to interference, AC and pulsed DC can cause interference, not straight DC. Even then, twisted pair cabling would resolve it. It's also a non-issue. Seen interference problems on USB? It runs power through the cable.
Also, if the power cable through the motherboard goes bad, you have to get an all new motherboard.
As someone who has designed PC boards, I can tell you that it's not going to happen. That's like worrying that your soup spoons will "go bad."
Keep the power supply supplying power to everything directly, it cuts down on complications that can crop up.
More cables, more connectors, more routing problems, more expense. It adds complication.