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Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the sata-to-go dept.

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."

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't SATA small enough? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Isn't SATA small enough? by PaintyThePirate · · Score: 5, Informative

      I assume that by "use smaller connectors", they meant that SATA is smaller than the connectors currently being used in mini hard drives. While power usage may be limited more by the drive itself, size may not be. Take a look at the currect standard for 1 inch hard drives. It needs 52 pins on it. SATA in contrast, only needs 8, plus whatever is needed for power.

      --
      eclecti.cc
  2. Linux support for Serial ATA by jsrodrigues · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

    1. Re:Linux support for Serial ATA by taylortbb · · Score: 5, Informative

      Any distro based on the 2.6 kernel series will support SATA (Mandrake 10 (my reccomendation), SuSE 9.1, Fedora Core 2, etc.). I wonder if this will make it harder for people to port Linux to mini devices, it took a while just for normal SATA support in the kernel.

    2. Re:Linux support for Serial ATA by Nachtfalke · · Score: 5, Informative

      I have a box running Fedora Core 2 and a Silicon Image 3114 based S-ATA controller, works like a charm, no extra drivers necessary.
      And I found http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html to be a very interesting read, helped me decide on the Dawicontrol DC-154 controller.