eSATA Connectors

buffalocheese writes "Since the introduction of the Serial ATA 1.0a specification in 2002, many manufacturers have introduced PCI and CardBus cards with both internal and external SATA connections. At first these internal and external connectors were completely identical, but later, external connectors started to appear which were still fully compatible with the internal sockets but featured added extra screening for external use. With the introduction of the SATA II specification in mid 2004 a new external SATA connector was defined. These new external (eSATA) connectors are not compatible with the original internal SATA connection. Currently there are add-on cards and drive housings available which feature both types of SATA connection for external use. Gradually the older types will disappear and all new SATA cards will feature the eSATA connector for external drive connections."

Comments

Ruse to sell more motherboards

[unity100]

and thats it.

It was pci before, then they went to agp, then agp X, 2x, 4, 16x.

and voila - its pci express now. curious that they were not able to invent the 'express' part a few years back.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[thc69]

Damn...and I just bought a USB-SATA bridge to replace my obsolete USB-IDE bridge.

Curse you, Sabrent!

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Guspaz]

While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards. PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit). The shared nature of the PCI bus was also an extremely frustrating limitation.

By contrast, PCI-Express 1x slightly increases the bandwidth from roughly 133MB/s to 150MB/s, but more importantly each device gets that, it's not shared anymore. And of course, 2x and higher slots provide more bandwidth.

But when it comes to graphics, AGP 8x was (at the time) providing more than enough bandwidth... as for the demands of modern monsterous graphics cards (such as the 8800 GTX), for all I know they might be able to saturate an AGP 8x bus.

As I understand it anyhow, the more tangible benefits from moving from AGP to PCI-Express were increase bi-directional bandwidth (AGP was great at Host->Card, but sucked at Card->Host), and increased ease with sticking multiple PCI-Express slots on the motherboard, making modern SLI possible.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[operagost]

Hey, if you want to keep using your Packard Bell 286 with the ISA slots and monochrome VGA, I won't stop you. But remember, it still takes them a little time to reverse-engineer all these technologies from the alien spacecraft they recovered in '48.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Aladrin]

You got modded troll not because the eSata isn't a ruse, but because all the other things aren't. Maybe we could have jumped from agp 2x to apg 16x in 1 jump, but express is different enough that they couldn't have just been 'able to invent the express part a few years back' any more than they could have just invented P4's instead of 2's and 3's.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[LWATCDR]

AGP was only for Graphics cards and I am pretty sure you where limited to only one AGP slot.
I think the idea with PCIe is that if we are going to make a really fast interface for things like RAIDs and network interface cards we might as well replace AGP at the same time so we only have one type of slot to deal with.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Joe The Dragon]

AGP was only fast one way pci-e is fast for bandwidth both ways.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still using sbus you insensitive clod!

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Joe The Dragon]

one slot per bus you can have more then one AGP bus.
There was talk of other cards for the agp slot but they did not come out.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[mwvdlee]

Simply put; AGP was a stop-gap fix for the PCI problem, PCI-Express is a true solution.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Andy Dodd]

One correction, one addition:
I'm fairly positive that it's 250 MB/sec per lane, not 150 for PCI-E.

In addition, not only is that per-device, it is per-device, per-direction (full duplex, 250MB/sec to the device and 250MB/sec back at the same time)

As to why PCI-E couldn't have been developed back when PCI or AGP were available (rather than incremental steps) - Moore's law. It simply wasn't possible to make silicon capable of handling PCI Express data rates (each lane uses serial communications at 2.5 gbits/sec, which was definately NOT possible with the silicon available back when PCI or AGP were initially developed.)

For those that wonder why PCI-E uses 2.5 Gbit/sec signaling but only transfers 250MB/sec of data, it is because all data is encoded using either 4B5B or 8B10B encoding (I can't remember which of the two), which maps every 4 data bits to 5 signal bits for 4B5B or 8-to-10 for 8B10B. This is done to ensure a minimum number of bit transitions in a given period of time, and also ensure that the signaling has no DC bias. (i.e. equal number of 0s and 1s no matter what the input data is).

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[HTH NE1]

There was talk of other cards for the agp slot but they did not come out.

Yes, much like how SCSI keyboards were envisioned.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Jherek Carnelian]

The shared nature of the PCI bus was also an extremely frustrating limitation.

Shared PCI was purely an implementation detail. There are many systems out there where each PCI slot is its own private PCI bus. PC's tended to use shared PCI buses because it was cheaper to implement, and most cards did not need the full bandwidth just for themselves so for the general case it was a win.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Guspaz]

Most cards, yes. But in recent years, it has become a problem. Gigabit NICs and RAID controllers don't have much trouble saturating the bus. PCI-based gigabit NICs tend to top out at about 400mbit, which is odd considering that's significantly less than PCI's own limits... I guess there's some overhead going on there.

There were also many conflicts because of the shared bus. Who here hasn't had trouble with stuttering audio on a PCI soundcard because some other device in the bus was causing trouble?

PCI-X solved the bandwidth problem, but never really made it into the consumer space. And yet the bandwidth demands from consumers increasingly stressed the PCI bus.

Motherboard manufacturers eventually solved the problem by moving on-board gigabit controllers from the PCI bus to either a dedicated bus (Intel did this, I think), or a different general purpose bus (HyperTransport?). Such controllers saw an immense performance improvement.

RAID controllers are a good example because modern 7200RPM drives have peak (not burst, peak) read speeds of about 90MB/s at the outside of the disk. Put two of those on a RAID controller and you've got some serious bandwidth issues.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Linker3000]

Funny, but do you remember the mess with the 32-bit 'video' VESA bus - it was not long before we had VESA IDE cards, SCSI HBAs and NICs and it was sometimes a pain to get the whole lot to work.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[drsmithy]

While I'm not as certain when it comes to graphics cards, PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards.

Hardly. The typical PC wouldn't even go close to saturating a basic 33Mhz/32 bit PCI bus. They just don't do enough "stuff".

PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate (A single gigabit NIC would hit a bandwidth wall at something like 400mbit).

33/32 PCI, as seen in most consumer level systems, tops out at around 120MB/sec aggregate bandwidth. *Most* people wouldn't come anywhere close to that, except in contrived (and hence rare) benchmarking situations. Copying a file over the network to another machine is a reasonable example of one of the few ways this might happen, but average consumer level hard disks won't sustain much more than about 50MB/s (except in ideal conditions) and it's unlikely the machine on the other end will be much better.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

PCI-Express is/was sorely needed to replace PCI for general expansion cards. PCI had a limited amount of bandwidth available that was extremely easy to saturate

Or, depending on your point of view, PCI is sorely needed to replace PCIe for many purposes. Ever wonder why there are no PCIe sound cards?

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[tigersha]

Envisioned? SCSI keyboards existed. Thanks to all that is holy that THAT idea got nixed.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Guspaz]

So according to that article, there are no PCIe soundcards because it's a different technology and Creative can't just slap a PCI-Express connector on their existing hardware with minimal R&D effort. BOO HOO. Creative and their hardware accelerated soundcards are becoming increasingly irrelevant as host-based audio progresses... Especially with Vista removing support for hardware accelerated audio in general (without workaround hacks in the drivers for OpenAL support) and providing much of the functionality in software.

We can expect PCI-Express soundcards from Creative soon, perhaps starting with their ExpressCard version of the X-Fi for notebooks (ExpressCard uses either PCIe for internal slots or USB2.0 for external slots).

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Guspaz]

Hardly. The typical PC wouldn't even go close to saturating a basic 33Mhz/32 bit PCI bus. They just don't do enough "stuff".

The typical PC is not the only scenario though. A lot of enthusiasts are/were also stuck with it. And even the average consumer using the typical PC probably occasionally runs into the scenario where one device is interfering with their PCI-based soundcard.

33/32 PCI, as seen in most consumer level systems, tops out at around 120MB/sec aggregate bandwidth. *Most* people wouldn't come anywhere close to that, except in contrived (and hence rare) benchmarking situations. Copying a file over the network to another machine is a reasonable example of one of the few ways this might happen, but average consumer level hard disks won't sustain much more than about 50MB/s (except in ideal conditions) and it's unlikely the machine on the other end will be much better.

GigE is increasingly a consumer application, to the point where the typical PC has a decent chance of having onboard ethernet. I don't know why GigE on PCI caps out at about 40% of the actual bandwidth PCI supplies; my guess is there's some overhead on top of simply passing the packets back and forth, and/or the benchmarks were using PCI-based disk controllers.

The average drive is getting faster and faster, and this will rapidly continue, especially with the introduction of perpendicular recording. Current top-end drives such as the Hitach 1TB drive, or the WD Raptor, currently post average speeds of ~75MB/s, significantly higher than where PCI-based GigE network cards hit their wall (About 50-60MB/s).

These capacities of drives, while high end now, will in short order be in the typical consumer's PC. If we consider the typical PC to today have a 250GB drive (Yes, I know Dell currently is offering 500GB drives in PCs under $1000, but that's a promotion), and considering how rapidly perpendicular recording is pumping up capacities much faster than something like Moore's Law might predict, it will only be a few years before 1TB drives are typical. And with every passing day, such high speed drives inch closer and closer towards typical as they become cheaper and cheaper.

So, even today, a high-end user isn't going to have much trouble hitting PCI's limitations. It's not limited to simply contrived benchmarks.

The Raptor is a pretty common drive itself. I wouldn't even call it enthusiast level, simply high-end. An enthusiast today looking for the maximum speed might combine two or more Raptor drives in RAID, at which point that RAID card, with a theoretical maximum sustained speed of about 180MB/s if both drives are reading from the outside of their platters, and average speeds of perhaps 150MB/s, PCI is again going to be the limiting factor.

As for GigE saturating the PCI bus, motherboard and chipset manufacturers already found a solution; they moved the GigE chipsets off the PCI bus and onto dedicated or non-PCI buses. And of course, we now have cheap PCIe GigE cards to solve that for add-in cards, as well as for RAID, and other such uses.

OK, so this post is getting a bit rambling, but my point is that you didn't (don't) have to go very far from the "typical" PC to reach a user who can saturate the PCI bus during typical usage.

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

So according to that article, there are no PCIe soundcards because it's a different technology and Creative can't just slap a PCI-Express connector on their existing hardware with minimal R&D effort. BOO HOO.

Apparently nobody can -- do you know of any PCIe soundcards?

Creative and their hardware accelerated soundcards are becoming increasingly irrelevant as host-based audio progresses... Especially with Vista removing support for hardware accelerated audio in general (without workaround hacks in the drivers for OpenAL support) and providing much of the functionality in software.

That's great but this has nothing to do with "hardware accelerated soundcards". There are *no* PCIe soundcards available today, with any featureset, for any price.

We can expect PCI-Express soundcards from Creative soon, perhaps starting with their ExpressCard version of the X-Fi for notebooks (ExpressCard uses either PCIe for internal slots or USB2.0 for external slots).

We can expect it, but do we have any reason to believe it'll happen soon?

How long does it take before the complete absense of an entire industry from transitioning to a new bus is seen as a problem with the bus, and not one company (or ten)?

Re:Ruse to sell more motherboards

[Guspaz]

That's great but this has nothing to do with "hardware accelerated soundcards". There are *no* PCIe soundcards available today, with any featureset, for any price.

Sure it does. The point is that if host-based (and/or USB based) audio is good enough (and it increasingly is), the vast majority of users don't need discrete soundcards at all, let alone PCI-Express ones.

We can expect it, but do we have any reason to believe it'll happen soon?

We do. They appear to have demonstrated it, assuming that the models they showed off were actually functioning.

How long does it take before the complete absense of an entire industry from transitioning to a new bus is seen as a problem with the bus, and not one company (or ten)?

The discrete soundcard "industry" has shriveled to a tiny fraction of what it once was. These days, the typical user does NOT have a soundcard in their computer. They likely use the sound chipset integrated into their motherboards. Gamers are increasingly likely to use heapdhones that include a USB soundcard.

With the market for discrete internal soundcards so weak, THAT can be seen as the real reason they haven't moved to PCI-Express yet; the market is already small and all PCs that have PCI-e slots still have PCI slots, so there is no real benefit in introducing a PCI-Express soundcard.

Obviously, since many notebooks sold today have completely transitioned to PCI-Express via ExpressCard slots (fairly recently though), there *is* the pressure for them to do it there, which is obviously why they're getting ready to introduce those kinds of cards.

I see this as a problem with market pressures rather than rumored technical issues.

Are they better, or just different?

[jandrese]

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the current SATA connectors. They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place (and at least one of them is usually loose or completely off). Because of this I've been reluctant to switch to SATA on external enclosures. If this new connector can prove itself resistant to falling off, it may in fact be a winner (I would even advocate unifying the connectors again under the new standard). I do like the fact that both the external and internal SATA connectors are currently the same, I just don't like the connector itself. It's rather nice to be able to take an old AT power supply (the kind where the power switch is hardwired to the supply) and plug in an off of the shelf SATA drive to the back of my case in a pinch. Plus, fewer connector types means fewer adapters I'll eventually have to own.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Bios_Hakr]

While I don't suffer from the connectivity problem, I have another gripe: SATA connectors stick straight out.

Sure, you can spend a bit more to get a good, angled cable. But the free ones included with hard drives and motherboards are always annoying.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Coopjust]

I have an eSATA external drive. My current mobo doesn't have eSATA built in, but I use it via a SATA to eSATA adapter card in my PC.

Well, it's definitely more snug than a regular SATA cable, but it isn't quite as snug as USB. Still, the speed is amazing, and the cables are better IMO. The speed is definitely faster than USB.

Only catch is if I hook up a drive while in Windows with that converter, it'll lockup. Has to be turned on before I boot the computer. This is a limitation of the adapter; from what I've read, you should be able to hot swap with a "real" eSATA port.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[GIL_Dude]

Thinking back to the old centronics cable that old printers had and some SCSI-1 connections used they had little clips on the side that you fliiped up to lock the cable into place. Maybe we need some kind of similar device for SATA cables. This would be fairly simple and wouldn't require changing the connection itself; just something that slipped over/around it or something would be sufficient. I know I just re-did my machine by moving the ports on the existing 2 250 GB SATA drives and adding 2 500 GB SATA drives. Now, as you mention working in the case is a pain and I do have to check each connection carefully or they do indeed just come out.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Actually, there is a product that can help with this. You might want to try it.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Hoi Polloi]

The bodies of the connectors are also fragile. I broke a piece off one while just trying to push some cables aside. They need to make them stronger and shorter so they exert less leverage on the board's connector.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[jelle]

Yet another connector hidden in the back where you have to keep fiddling to get the plug in... In this case two tries should suffice, but geesh I bet they spend millions coming up with another useless connector (how is it better than the sata version?). At the very least they could have made it very obvious from the outside which way the plug should go in, but the hole is symmetrical, but the internals of the connectors are very much not so.

I stand by my opinion that connector people are idiots.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[kayakermanmike]

I found a little tape does wonders as well.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Blymie]

Tell me about it. Current SATA connectors are horrible in some situations. I've actually had situations where I've had to use a glue gun to literally keep the connectors from coming off on their own.

That's utterly horrible, and damned lame.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, you make feel old. My printer is still connected that way

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Penguin's Advocate]

It's your cables, and not necessarily because they're cheap. As the IT person for a 100% SATA shop I've had plenty of experience with this. Some SATA cables will fall off, sometimes without any provocation, others won't come off without significant provocation. Some SATA cables even have locking mechanisms to hold them to your drives. Asus for example ships motherboards with one of two different types of SATA cables. In my experience the red ones suck and the gray ones are excellent, but which you get seems to be luck of the draw (like when I order 40 motherboards, I get some with red and some with gray). Areca RAID controllers seem to come with great cables as well, I've got about 20 of them and they all came with the same cables.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[jandrese]

I actually have the opposite gripe (but usually about the power connectors), the connector is usually flush with the drive but the power cables come out the top and bottom of it. If you have anything adjascent to your drive (another drive, 8800GTX, etc...) the cables have to be bent at a sharper angle than I prefer. I actually still prefer using the Molex connectors most of the time because they fit snugly, are easy to access (they're on the right hand side of the drive), and the cables stick straight out the back.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[ParaphiliaNOS]

eSATA is pretty much SATA with locking clips.
I use a HD3-SU2S2 external 2.5" drive which came with a SATA to eSATA converter (via a PCI slot). I'm loving the 1.5Gbs interface. The enclosure supports 3Gbs, but when I bought my laptop drive SATAII wasn't a common speed for 2.5" drives. I recommend this enclosure because SATA and SATAII are much faster and more MB native for HDs than any USB/Firewire interface.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[TheGavster]

They added a clip mechanism in the latest revision of the spec to solve the falling out issue. I would switch to SATA just to get rid of the damned molex power connectors, though; pain to get on and off, and the pins come from the factory loose and out of line.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[theJML]

They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place (and at least one of them is usually loose or completely off).

Really?? I have the opposite problem. I work in a lab where we have pretty much nothing but SATA drives, and many of the most popular SATA RAID Cards (and some of the just plain expensive ones), and I frequently have to be very careful not to rip the port off of the SATA Card when removing the cable. They just simply WON'T LET GO. It's probably my only gripe with SATA cables that the ends snap together so tightly. I just figured it'd be fine for people who built their PC and didn't move things around often like we do so I've never really complained. We probably have 3 or 4 cards here where at least one of the sata ports was snapped off due to removing the cable, and a few server backplanes where we had to resolder a new plug onto it.

I do however agree with another poster that the cable kinda sticks out a ways sometimes when plugged in, but you can always order the right angle cables if you need to. Over all I think the benifits of the SATA Cables outweigh the old IDE Ribbon Style.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[TheThiefMaster]

You should be able to hot-swap with "real" SATA 2.0 as well. My guess is you've plugged you're adapter into a SATA 1.0/1.1 socket and that's why you have no hot-swap.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[ChrisA90278]

"...I'm not a big fan of the current SATA connectors. They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place..."

This is a poor case design. The best way to use a SATA drive is to have NO CABLE. The drives are designed to they can be pushed onto a socket that is soldered to a printed circuit board. All new design computers should be designed this way, with no cable. Drive push into the computer from the front like SCSI drives with SCA connectors

If the computer uses a cable (for power or data) then it is a retrofit, a hold over from the IDE era. Over time internal cables should just "go away". Now you see way the connector can't be totight or have a positive retention (latch.)

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[lattyware]

Actually, the ones that came free with my Asus P5B Deluxe are angled.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Micah]

I recently got a laptop with an eSATA port. Then got an Icy Dock enclosure and a Samsung 500GB SATA-II drive from Newegg.

I can hotplug the thing in both Windows and Linux. Speed is twice as fast as the internal drive (according to hdparm -t). I'm thrilled with it!

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Afrosheen]

Yeah the cables make all the difference. Gigabyte generally ships their boards with the nice yellow SATA cables which have locking tabs on both sides of the connector. It just takes a light pinch to remove them from the SATA socket, but once they're in, they're not going anywhere.

If only everyone spent .05 on two pieces of tin to make all cables lock like those. *sigh*

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[supercoop]

Western Digital SATA drives have the regular Molex connection and that is why I will only use them. Those SATA connections are so sloppy that the data and power cable falls off. WD drives also have a kind of propriety extension on the data connection retention mechanism called SureConnect.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[LarsG]

I was under the impression that the SATA standard always supported hotplugging (e.g., both 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0). However, due to cost-cutting at least early implementations of consumer SATA drives and controllers didn't support it. Especially with regards to the early controllers, which pretty much were PATA controllers with simple PATA to SATA converters.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Richy_T]

You jest but I have the SATA connector hot-glued on my home system because it took only a little force to break the plastic bit off. Luckily the electrical connections were still good. I put the plastic bit back, slid the conenctor back on then hot-glued one big lump. (This after trying a couple of times to reglue the plastic bit. I didn't ever have much hope of that though).

Rich

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Anonymous Coward]

krazy glue sticks too well.

I recommend a little blob of RTV. It holds the cable in place, but peels off when you need to remove the cable.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, that still requires a non-standard motherboard and case, so that's out of reach for many of the people who routinely need to work in their case, like the original poster. Additionally you'll at least need some sort of screw-on guides if you want a properly pluggable drive, since the rough size and screw positions are all that's standardized, and you don't

So yes, that's the best way to use SATA, but we have to wait some time for further standardization if it's ever going to reach the normal self-built PCs. I'm not going to hold my breath, as it has long been the realm of "somewhat good enough" solutions...

BTW: Somewhat interesting intermediate solution in the PowerMac G5 of a couple years back - there are cables, but they're only about 1cm long, and can't be obstructed.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[DrVomact]

I agree with you that the first SATA connectors were brain-dead. For the life of me, I can't understand what the designers were thinking when they didn't include a latch. However, I never really had problems with the plugs falling off--it was just a source of neurotic worry, like whether I turned off the soldering iron after I used it last time. In any case, the advantages of the SATA cable (thin, greater maximum length than the old IDE cables, no slave/master foo) outweighed any worries about the wobbly connectors, so I've been using SATA ever since it first came out.

However, you speak of "the current SATA connecters"; have you really looked at SATA cables recently? The last couple of times I built a PC, the SATA cables came with little clips that lock them firmly into place. I'm not sure if this is part of a new standard, or if some manufacturers are simply doing the obvious. Perhaps you should look around for some of these "clippy" cables.

I do wish someone would come up with a connector that I could look at, and instantly tell which way to plug it in. Of course, I'm kind of challenged in the area of visual/spatial perception...I even have trouble with those D shaped connectors for the video output. I'll look at one, look at the socket, decide which way it has to go...and find I'm trying to plug it in backwards. Diodes give me panic attacks.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[DragonWyatt]

This is a poor case design. The best way to use a SATA drive is to have NO CABLE. The drives are designed to they can be pushed onto a socket that is soldered to a printed circuit board. All new design computers should be designed this way, with no cable. How do you propose to connect this secondary board to the motherboard?

The backplane doesn't solve the problem, it just moves the problem- to an extra piece of hardware that increases cost and complexity (no doubt every single case manufacturer will insist that their "exclusive" approach is "superior" - look at the current crap with 3.5 and 5.25 slide rails).

I guess you could be careful to route this mobo-to-backplane cable out of the way... But you could (and should) also do this with the mobo-to-drive cable.

I've had exactly the same problem as the OP with SATA cables - the solution is to secure them out of your maintenance path in some way, or as the OP said, check them when you're done.

Drive push into the computer from the front like SCSI drives with SCA connectors Do note that the SCA backplane must connect to the controller or motherboard using, you guessed it, a cable.

SCSI cables, however, don't seem to have this problem, perhaps due to their enterprise engineering pedigree.

SATA, IMNSHO, is just a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you propose to connect this secondary board to the motherboard?

On my computer, there is no secondary board, and the SATA sockets are on the motherboard itself. I realize that this may not be a viable solution for every computer, but it's something to consider.

SATA, IMNSHO, is just a solution looking for a problem.

The parallel nature of IDE was starting to really limit its maximum possible speed. This alone makes SATA worth it. The small cables and hot-swapping are just gravy.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[OrangeTide]

Buying a good quality motherboard or SATA controller will get you SATA cables with metal clips that don't fall out. The free ones tend to be the cheapest possible connectors, the same is true of the free IDE ribbon cables too.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[loraksus]

Yeah, so when the flimsy 0.5mm plastic breaks, you have to replace a motherboard instead of a $1 cable.
Brilliant.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[jbarlow]

At some point, I set up a fileserver with what was technically SATA drives in an external enclosure. However, the backplanes involved converted the four SATA signals into a single Infiniband connector, which uses screws like a VGA connector. Disgustingly fast, and we've never been worried that anything's going to come undone.

Re:Are they better, or just different?

[WuphonsReach]

You ended up with cheap SATA cables (interior).

The better cables come with metal clips on the connectors that help lock them into the socket. They're just not that common and somewhat difficult to obtain. The ones I have came with a set of removable SATA drive trays.

Any advantages over having only one connector?

[What the Frag]

I really don't see the advantage in having 2 types of connectors doing the same thing for internal and external use.

Except they want to sell me another cable - or did I miss anything?

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[pipatron]

Nope, you've got it all right.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the pictures in the linked article, the two connectors look pretty similar. Is there anything to make it easy to tell which is which when you're crawling around on the floor under a desk trying to plug something in? And are they idiot-proofed at all? A client of mine one managed to force a 6 pin firewire cable in the wrong way around (tough, but possible, as he proved) and blew the bridge circuit in the external drive case. This looks like it might be even easier to mess up... or will it be like the Sony power supplies with a 'really easy to spot' 0.5mm blip on one side of the tiny black plastic connector?!

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes. The internal connectors/old external connectors are poorly suited for external use. Just brushing one of those can nudge the cable out of its socket.

As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet. By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused, the interface decided upon will be further commoditized and prices for cables and connectors and such will fall.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[HardWoodWorker]

There is a significant advantage in that internal cables are thinner and more fragile than external ones. The optimal internal cable in thin and easy to route in tight places and you really don't care how fragile the connectors are. The optimal external cable and connectors would be rugged because you're worried about packing it on a plane, tripping over it, etc. You're not worried about airflow or its bend radius.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[atarione]

well....... the SATA cable is kinda of a joke, (really easy to damage or knock loose)..... using a SATA cable for an external drive seems like a bad idea. But then again I'm not sure the eSATA are any more resilient

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

also it appears you can go to 2 meters in length with eSATA as opposed to maximum 1 meter with regular SATA cables

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Surt]

There is actually a range of cost in the physical connector, as there is a range in the function of those connectors.

Universalizing also risks having people plug the wrong thing into the wrong place, unless the underlying physical and logical transport is also the same, in which case cost is an even bigger issue.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Guspaz]

The official specs for eSATA essentially say the cable is better suited for external use. Here's what they have to say about it:

The external cable connector is a shielded version of the connector specificed in SATA 1.0a with these basic differences:

            The External connector has no "L" shaped key, and the guide features are vertically offset and reduced in size. This prevents the use of unshielded internal cables in external applications.

            To prevent ESD damage, the insertion depth is increased from 5mm to 6.6mm and the contacts are mounted further back in both the receptacle and plug.

            To provide EMI protection and meet FCC and CE emission requirements, the cable has an extra layer of shielding, and the connectors have metal contact points.

            There are springs as retention features built into the connector shield on both the top and bottom surfaces.

The external connector and cable are designed for over five thousand insertions and removals while the internal connector is only specified to withstand fifty.

They make it pretty clear exactly what's different. The biggest difference is the cable is shielded, while internal SATA is not (or less so?). And obviously the connector being rated for a hundred times more insertions is a pretty big difference.

I should note that in recent benchmarks done by MaximumPC, eSATA did not provide substantial performance benefits over Firewire800 drives. eSATA featured a higher burst speed, but more or less equivalent average transfer rates and seek times. Unless there were specific licensing issues with Firewire 800, I would rather have seen it become the preferred drive interface; I'll take a general purpose connector that I can use for other stuff over something as specific as eSATA any day, especially when eSATA provides little benefit.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[greg1104]

By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused

Clearly you've never actually worked with end-users. The fact that the major connectors are physically different, and therefore won't fit in the other holes no matter how hard you push, is the only reason they're sometimes plugged into the correct spot now.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[MankyD]

As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet.

By keeping different cord types, they prevent different communications protocols from plugging into the wrong ports. For instance, the ethernet protocol and the USB protocol are not compatible. Therefore, the layman user won't accidentally plug their mouse port into the wall.

Also, different cables have different qualities, allowing different data rates across them for different prices. Imagine the price of a 100 foot hdmi cable vs. the prices of 100 feet of cat 5!

In generaly, I do agree that we could do a much better job than we are currently doing - one type for video, one type for audio (hdmi can carry both video and audio of course), one type for network, and one type for other peripherals (i.e. usb). Expansion cards could then be purchased for specialty needs, such as serial ports, ps2, and firewire.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Em Ellel]

As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet. By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused, the interface decided upon will be further commoditized and prices for cables and connectors and such will fall. You are kidding right? Average user can barely tell the difference between these cables now and you want to make them all look the same to make it LESS confusing. It will just confuse them more. You will find the monitor plugged into the ethernet port, keyboards into the video port and hard drive plugged into the wall socked and a frustrated user going "why isn't this working?!?!?!?" I mean most people cant tell the difference between VGA and 9-pin serial port, and forget about the number of people who try to plug into phone wire into the ethernet port instead of modem. USB did a decent job of universalizing peripheral connections, but that does not have the bandwidth to carry video signal and unless you start building ethernet cards into the wall sockets, it will not work for ethernet. (a USB NIC is still has all the same cables, even more) The only way you can make all cables the same is by making all ports on the computer the same - that the same as in same logically , not just physically, because most are of the mentality - if the plug fits, it must be the right place to plug it in.

-Em

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet.

What a great idea. You do realise that no current USB or Firewire bus has even slightly enough bandwidth to push low-resolution VGA over it, let alone HD quality video. And how do you suggest we network our machines together; USB cross-over cables? Ohh, feel the speed.

By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused

Users wont be confused because they wont be able to see anything on their monitor and the USB bus would be saturated so they couldn't enter anything with the keyboard either?

Hell, let's get rid of all those pesky internal expansion slots as well, users only get confused by PCI, AGP and PCI-X connectors. DIMM slots better go too, in case someone tries to ram a PCI-E 16x card into one of them. And we'll surface mount CPU's from now on too, so you'll never again have to deal with the confusion of having to know what socket you have.

That's a real nice computer you've got there!

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[British]

well....... the SATA cable is kinda of a joke, (really easy to damage or knock loose)


I just assembled a new system last week, and can't speak highly enough of SATA. With IDE cables, it always seemed no matter what, you always had to turn around the ribbon cable upside down to fit the hard drive or optical drive. The ribbon cable, in all its wonderful cheapness was a huge hassle to snake around a case, and had a wonderful airflow-choking design. Sometimes it's too short of a distance from the motherboard connector to the drive slots, sometimes you had about 20 extra feet it seemed to stuff somewhere when it was too long. Oh, and if there's no tab on the connector, make sure you don't hook it up backwards(or is there a missing pin to prevent that? I forgot).

Meanwhile at work, we had a a dual-boot system where we switched SATA connectors between 2 drives, and it was a breeze.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Excelcia]

I see, the external cables are shielded. Tha makes a lot of sense. Because, after all, there's way more EMI outside of my computer case than inside.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[alta]

It's funny about your USB/Ethernet example. A usb device will fit in an ethernet port quite easily. It will even be snug in one direction, although it will wobble the other way. On a lot of our Dells the Ethernet port is directly above a stack of 2-4 USB ports. A few times I've given one of the computers the reach-around and found i've plugged a mouse in the wrong port. Shorting all the pins on an ethernet card can't be a good thing, I think this is a bad design.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[univgeek]

The shielding is not only to prevent interference *into* the cable, it's also to prevent the cable from generating interference for other devices. See CE certification and EMI certification etc.

At 3GHz, it'll make a very nice antenna out of any wire - the shielding is a necessity for certification.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[imsabbel]

It might not be mush faster than FW-800, but it CANNOT be slower.
(as FW just adds an additional layer of complexity, with the drive being sata anyways)

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[mwvdlee]

That only makes sense if you assume the harddisk to be connected through FW800 must be SATA, for which there is no reason to do so.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Nazlfrag]

If the plugs and connectors share the same hardware interface it won't matter where anythings plugged, much like UDB. You could rearrange the ports all of your USB devices without a hiccup. A standard interface is unlikely, but could potentially do wonders - it won't matter where you plug it in, as long as the bios can identify the kb, display etc.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Vihai]

Because, after all, there's way more EMI outside of my computer case than inside

Are you really sure? Because unless you live in a microwave oven, the opposite is much more plausible :)

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Anonymous Coward]

If everybody was happy with FW800, nobody would even bother with eSATA. The only reason it was created was because people were cobbling together their own by just pulling the standard SATA cables outside their computer cases. It makes sense because the drives already speak SATA.

To make a FW800 connection, you need to have a FW800 port on a PC, a special FW800 cable, and a FW800 drive enclosure. Even if each of those only costs $5 more than the eSATA version, it's still an additional $15 per drive. It also means I can have a single PCI card that has internal connectors and external ones. There's no card that has internal SATA connecters and external FW800 jacks.

And those FW800 speeds were probably only for single drives. If you have a RAID array attached to your port, eSATA is going to be faster.

dom

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[AusIV]

I think GP was suggesting every connector should do everything. That'd be great. The place you plug in your mouse is also capable of network connections and video. Having every connector on your computer do everything would drastically simplify things, but it certainly wouldn't keep costs down.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called sarcasm, son...

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[AncientPC]

I take it you hate USB as well? USB has greatly standardized devices that would otherwise be hogging serial / parallel / proprietary ports and I don't see people shoving stuff where it doesn't belong.

The problem is if something fits in a USB port but isn't supposed to work with USB. I haven't seen a device like that exist.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Anonymous Coward]

What else would it be? SCSI? hehehe..(SCSI drives are still available, but holy crap are they expensive!) Seriously, though, noone makes an actual Firewire drive. They are SATA, IDE, or SCSI (.. or SAS and a few other odd connections). Firewire enclosures typically use SATA or IDE.

          Speeds? Well, IDE has (along with a bunch of lower speeds) ATA/66, ATA/100 and ATA/133, which run at 66, 100, and 133MB/sec. (A few drives do still use the slower 2 speeds for some reason.) SATA runs at 1.5gbps or 3.0gbps, which gets about 150MB/sec or 300MB/sec. Firewire 800 will get around 100MB/sec.

          However, the PCI bus maxes at 133MB/sec, so if you're using an add-in card rather than onboard, that'll limit SATA's speed a bit (onboard SATA typically runs into some higher-speed connection built into the motherboard's chipset).

          But, even more limiting, most hard drives on the market will not reach even 80MB/sec, and seek times on newer drives are not improving (the tracks are getting narrower, so in some cases seek times have slightly worsened over the last several years.) I would guess some umm.. cheap.. drives probably would probably not even max out USB 2.0 (480mbps, or about 48MB/sec max.)

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[CompMD]

I guess you are too young to really remember SCSI...

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Jherek Carnelian]

It might not be mush faster than FW-800, but it CANNOT be slower.
(as FW just adds an additional layer of complexity, with the drive being sata anyways)

You assume that the SATA protocol has equal or better efficiency than the firewire protocol.

For example, that latency sensitivity of SATA is less than or equal to that of firewire. You might be right, you might be wrong, I don't know. You might make the same assumption about USB, in which case you would definitely be wrong - the longer your USB cable, the slower your external hard disk because USB requires an ACK for every transmit with no windowing, while firewire can have multiple packets "in flight."

So, if your SATA drive has a similar limitation as USB, it is entirely possible that the SATA-to-FW bridge chip that would sit in the external drive case could buffer multiple data packets, taking advantage of the extremely short data-path between the drive and the bridge to produce a higher throughput over a long firewire cable than could be achieved over SATA cable of equal length.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[greg1104]

I don't see people shoving stuff where it doesn't belong. The problem is if something fits in a USB port but isn't supposed to work with USB. I haven't seen a device like that exist.

Then you should join the person I replied to in spending more time among the masses; while painful, it's an excellent way to discover how things get misdesigned and misused. I've run into several devices that plug into a USB port but don't work right, typically because someone hasn't paid attention to the standard for how much power is supposed to be available. From Wikipedia on USB:

Some USB devices draw more power than is permitted by the specification for a single port. This is a common requirement of external hard and optical disc drives and other devices with motors or lamps. Such devices can be used with an external power supply of adequate rating; some external hubs may, in practice, supply sufficient power.

I regularly tell people who purchased USB hard drives who are having problems that they should use an external power supply for the drive, even if the USB bus (either via the port itself or via powered hub) is supposed to provide enough power. In many cases, this has completedly cleared up intermittant problems they were having when running from USB bus power.

This sort of issue is exactly the problem with the "one connector to rule them all" idea. Consolidate a bunch of low-speed serial devices together into one standard, as USB does, great. But the physical specifications for the type of cable that provides a high-speed serial connection are slightly different from those of a cable aimed at power delivery. Video signals have their own quirks. The sort of over-engineered uber-cable rugged enough to handle all of these things at once is going to be physically larger and more expensive than the current cheap cables used for specific applications now, and I doubt the supposed "connectors will be cheaper because of higher volume" cost saving of such a scheme really exists as a result.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[donkeyoverlord]

USB A fits into an ethernet jack quite nicely....

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[acrobuddy]

That missing pin doesn't always help, I've had people still put them upside down and just push that pin inside of the HDD or optical drive, real pain to fix too. I'm glad I've moved to sataII, the cables that came with my ASUS a8n-sli deluxe are thinner than most sata cables I've had and fit snug in my Seagate drives, never had a problem with them coming loose. Even use an IDE->Sata converter on one of my older HDDS to save space on an extra IDE cable.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[StrawberryFrog]

The fact that the major connectors are physically different, and therefore won't fit in the other holes no matter how hard you push, is the only reason they're sometimes plugged into the correct spot now.

You're missing the point. e.g. With a USB device, *any* USB port is the correct one. And it makes life easier.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[norton_I]

Fortunately, ethernet is supposed to be transformer coupled, which should protect your card from most of the unpleasant things you can do to it. I have run into a few devices that use direct logic drive, but never a NIC in a desktop computer.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Moofie]

"The sort of over-engineered uber-cable rugged enough to handle all of these things at once is" called FireWire.

Just sayin'.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Wdomburg]

Aside from every drive controller being ATA (with PATA vanishing over time).

There's really not a market for putting anything but commodity drives on firewire - if performance is a concern, you'll hook SCSI, SAS or FC up to SCSI, SAS or FC.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[stewwy]

The reason USB cables work so well is that the design was originally for game consoles
If you design for a 3 yr old user it has to be robust. Users and 3yr olds have a lot in common, So they work pretty well.
Having said that my father-in-law (85) managed to plug one in the wrong way round,toasting a motherboard backplane, I didn't know he had that much strength left!

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[LarsG]

Universalizing also risks having people plug the wrong thing into the wrong place

Oh what fun it is to find an unlabeled RJ45 wall socket. POTS, ISDN, Ethernet, PoE or (very rarely) RS-232?

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[greg1104]

Firewire 800 isn't fast enough even for current generation video, it has to be compressed quite a bit to transfer across that type of link. Do the math: I estimate that even my 1024x768 laptop at 24 bit color/60Hz refresh is producing 1.1Gbps of video signal. The HDMI spec calls for almost 4Gbps of bandwidth, that's the ballpark for what a universal cable would need to handle for it to replace current video standards.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[AncientPC]

I worked IT support at one of the largest US universities for a few years. I'm not claiming to have spent my live "among the masses", but I dealt with a varied customer base from incoming students to aging professors that needed hand-holding through everything.

Yes, overloading un-powered USB hubs can cause problems but those occurrences are rare in my experience. However, I've never seen a hdd enclosure or external hdd that didn't come with its own power block. I haven't worked with many external cd/dvd burners but I'd guess most of them come with their own AC adapter as well.

The exact opposite scenario would be a disaster and it's evident in home theater setups. Every company feels the need to come out with their own plug and cable for whatever reason, and consumers end up spending a bundle on cable and adapters.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[operagost]

I heard of someone jamming a plug into an RJ45 socket.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Surt]

Indeed. I'm of the build my own computers sort, and even I've done this a couple of times ... that USB to ethernet port fit is just too perfect. (It happened to me because I was probing blind, hoping not to have to move a desk to move the computer behind it. The USB plug fit right into the ethernet port, which of course was immediately next to the USB port on the mother board layout. Thankfully, nothing broke, but oddly enough the mouse didn't start working until I discovered the problem.)

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[munwin99]

I have had more than one user destroy a USB port by forcing the connector in upside down.... idiots.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Master of Transhuman]

That's true, I read a hardware test where Firewire and eSATA were compared. They were close to the same speed for single drives, but once you start adding drives, eSATA pulls away from Firewire pretty quickly.

What I don't like is a multiplicity of connectors for the same protocol, either. Having two different Firewire connectors means I have to peer at them every time I mess with it (and my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be - not that ever was that great). The same will be true with SATA, unfortunately.

Still, it's obvious to me that eSATA is the cheap way to go for large amounts of external storage where a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN isn't justifiable. There are a number of people making eSATA enclosures with four-way port fan-in, so one four-port eSATA card can control up to 12 cheap SATA drives of 500-750GB each or 6-9 TB of storage.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[whit3]

Yep, the mistakes of SCSI are being repeated. When Apple put SCSI on their boxes
in 1986, there WAS NO STANDARD for the external connector, and DB-25 (which
encouraged malfunctional printer-cable and serial-cable connections) and
'Centronics' (actual Micro Blue Ribbon-50) with the funky springlatch were
rampant for years. Neither was crimpable directly to ribbon cable (but the
Centronics cables grew an expensive variant that converted the incompatible
spacing, so lotsa folk didn't know of that problem).

Then a standard was issued for the external connector; it only crimped onto
fine-pitch ribbon cable (everyone had to switch over), and used a funny spring
latch.

But SCSI was used for complex systems that lived in wiring closets, you CAN'T
tolerate loose connections, and those spring latches were terrible. With SCSI-3
came a new external connector standard, with a wider bus AND screwdown
connector latches. Took three tries to get it right.

So here we see SATA with standard specs for internal connectors only. Folk
need external, so they cobble a shield around the internal (but the unshielded
cables still fit-- OOPS!). The standard gets an update that requires a shield
and enforces it with a new plug, but uses flimsy latches. Consumers
will like it for temporary plugins, but the serial-attached-SCSI types
are claiming they interplug with SATA, and I just know a third connector
will be issued for the high-end folk, and it will be a repeat of SCSI.

What a waste of money, brains, time (WOMBAT).

I once labeled all the different SCSI connectors I'd seen used. A, B, C.... got to
about S. There's about 50 pounds of cables in my basement, with various
ends, all in the boxes marked SCSI.

We're gonna see the same with SATA.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[alta]

Amen! I'm way too lazy to pull the computer out from under the desk, or whever else, hence the reach-around...

I want to see a universal connector. It transfers data, both ways at 100Gb/sec, have power rails for 3/5/12/24/120/240 Volts, 10amps and a plug something like the round style trailer plugs. Of course it will be DRM free.

And I'll patent it.

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[loraksus]

So "does" a phone cable.
Worked for an DSL ISP for a while and I got a few of those calls (what do you mean I have to plug the DSL modem in?)

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[Kjella]

You assume that the SATA protocol has equal or better efficiency than the firewire protocol.

If they manage to build a specialized disk IO standard that's any other way, I'd call it damn impressive...

Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yes. The internal connectors/old external connectors are poorly suited for external use. Just brushing one of those can nudge the cable out of its socket.

I have a new e.SATA kit, and the external connectors are only marginally better. I was expecting a nice solid 'click'. No dice, and I bought the highly-rated more expensive cables on NewEgg.

As an aside, I think the industry should really standardize on something to be a 'universal' interface, like USB or Firewire for desktop systems. Let's just remove all other types of interfaces, even VGA/DVI/HDMI cables and maybe even Ethernet. By standardizing the interfaces, end users will be far less confused, the interface decided upon will be further commoditized and prices for cables and connectors and such will fall.

Your suggestion has merit, but for the user, not the manufacturers, so good luck with that. Ethernet clicks, does HDMI (it looks like it might)?

1394b was supposed to get up to 3.2GBps - that might have done it but it's MIA.

Dont' bother clicking the link

[Anonymous Coward]

as the description IS the article.

In any case, and this may be a bit off topic, I noticed this trend when I went to find an external enclosure for my SATA drive that used a simple USB connection. I was only able to find one enclosure that did so, and it had combination USB/eSATA ports so you could use either to connect to your computer. Personally I don't understand the reasoning behind needing eSATA (unless it's a speed/heat issue) when they only seem to connect to onboard SATA ports anyways. If you are going to do that, why not just make enclosures that use regular SATA and simply make some sort of extension cord that connects to the onboard SATA port?

Someone enlighten me please.

adverstory

[alta]

Errr, is someone pushing their product here?

Re:adverstory

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this alta person up! This was the most blatent form of spam I think I've ever seen on slashdot.

Re:adverstory

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

I'm glad to see you're back from vacation. Funny thing is, you've missed all the slashvertisements. Hope you enjoy them as much as we don't.

Re:adverstory

[peterjhill]

If I want to read spam, I will look in my email spam folder. I don't want my rss feeds to start filling up with garbage..

I think it is hilarious that all the people that are complaining about this crap "article" are getting modded off topic. ./, already out of my bookmark bar, nearly heading out of my rss news folder.. what happened /.

It was not even a good page about eSATA.. I am very interested in eSATA.. i have two external enclosures that have eSATA and USB2 connectors.. I was hoping for some good information on various expresscard and cardbus adapters (for two different computers), but instead find the article goes to a page on one manufactuers site.. no third party reviews of multiple products with reasons why one might be better than another.. sigh.

Wait a minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the blurb. Are there now two different eSATA connectors? My MB features eSATA ports, and you use them by routing an internal port (using a normal SATA cable) to the external one == compatible.

Re:Wait a minute?

[HTH NE1]

I think what the advertiser meant was that the original SATA connections were externalized as-is, but that eSATA introduces different keying.

I have the two extra SATA connectors on my Mac Pro's motherboard (presumably for SATA optical drive alternatives) connected to a backplane next to the not-double-wide video card which turns them into eSATA ports. I don't have any eSATA drives or enclosures yet, but I have the ports ready for when I back up my 1.5 TB RAID (3 * 500 GB) to another 1.5 TB RAID (2 * 750 GB).

eSATA doesn't appear to have made its way into brick-and-mortar stores yet: they're still in love with USB 2.0 drives and barely stock any Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 drives unless they also have USB 2.0. Same for DV bridges.

Re:Wait a minute?

[dvd_tude]

The Vantec enclosures (NexStar3) offer eSATA and USB and accept a 3.5" PATA drive. You can get them at Fry's, TigerDirect, NewEgg, etc.

They come with an eSATA-to-SATA (internal) adapter for your rear panel. They're pretty and shiny too ;-)

Skip the link

[jonoid]

TFA text:

Since the introduction of the Serial ATA 1.0a specification in 2002, many manufacturers have introduced PCI and CardBus cards with both internal and external SATA connections.

At first these internal and external connectors were completely identical, but later, external connectors started to appear which were still fully compatible with the internal sockets but featured added extra screening for external use.

With the introduction of the SATA II specification in mid 2004 a new external SATA connector was defined. These new external (eSATA) connectors are not compatible with the original internal SATA connection.

Currently there are add-on cards and drive housings available which feature both types of SATA connection for external use. Gradually the older types will disappear and all new SATA cards will feature the eSATA connector for external drive connections.

Hmm, the summmary is the article, which is just a couple of paragraphs on some computer peripheral website. Slashvertisement, anyone?

Yawn!

[bigmauler]

Why this wasn't tagged with "slow news day" is beyond me.

Re:This seems like a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Another clueless hypocritical old man failing to understand progress.

Mod Parent Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

He correctly used "loose"!

Re:Mod Parent Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

You (incorrectly) placed your punctuation mark outside of parantheses!

Re:Most Worthless Slashdot Post Ever?

[Ross D Anderson]

Oh four pin molex;
With your twin ground connections;
You're so down to earth.

Re:This seems like a trend

[danbert8]

I don't know about you, but while IDE and SATA may not have a noticeable performance impact, it sure is nice to have SATA when building or upgrading a computer. First SATA connectors are smaller, so they don't block airflow like ribbons. And second, SATA bypasses the insane primary/secondary, master/slave, legacy support, jumper hell.
 
As far as your AGP and ddr2 gripe. AGP had reached the limit of it's functions, and PCI-express is a better standard than AGP ever was. And DDR2 is not anything to whine about, DDR1 still exists and is compatible in most motherboards that support DDR2. In fact, if anything, DDR1 has gotten cheaper as a result. The only problem is they can't work mixed.
 
One other thing I wonder about. I thought that Intel also switched to PCI-express, DDR2, and SATA. Perhaps I was mistaken and Intel is a backwards company and use slower technology with their faster processors. Bear in mind that only applies to Intel motherboards, since it's the chipset that determines compatibility with most of that stuff. So blame VIA, or nVidia, and not AMD. For reference, my Gigabyte mobo has SATA and IDE connections, and supports DDR1 and DDR2 (though with AMD that is from the processor).
 
/end AMD fan ranting/

Re:This seems like a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not an AMD-specific problem. I had the same issue when an Intel motherboard died. I had to replace the CPU, RAM, and video card. There were no new motherboards that could take the old pieces.

However that's just what happens in such a fast-paced industry. Yes I had to replace a bunch of pieces, but the computer I wound up with was many times faster than the older one.

Despite what it sometimes feels like, these incompatibilities are not being created artificially to sell new products. It's that they are phasing-out old standards in favor of newer, better ones. Jamming all kinds of legacy cruft onto a motherboard is of course possible, but will certainly increase the pricetag.

I think the industry reaches a reasonable compromise. For instance new motherboards have lots of SATA connectors (because they assume new drives you buy will be SATA), but still have an IDE connector, too.

Is yet another interface change necessary?

[sixteenvolt]

Am I the only one who is nonplussed with the rapidity of basic interface changes among components? It would be a shame to see SATA take the path of AGP or CPU sockets, where the interface seems to be in a constant state of flux even though the hardware which USES the interface never actually improves at a matching pace.

Advertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how every comment on this topic that mentioned that this article is nothing more than an advertisement got modded "Offtopic". Morons.

Re:This seems like a trend

[ardor]

Hold on. Many upgrades are not really necessary, but among the ones you missed were:

* PCI-Express: A true PCI successor at last. Back when the 3D accelerators were taking off, the PCI bus turned out to be not efficient enough, but a successor was not in sight. So, AGP was invented, which is essentially a PCI slot with accelerated CPU->GPU transfer (i.e. a hack).
* SATA: Longer, MUCH thinner cables, hotplugging functionality, lower power consumption, Native Command Queuing (the HD can rearrange requests for improved performance).
* Intel socket 775: The first socket where I found the CPU cooler installation to be easy. Previous sockets were a nightmare (478, or AMD's insane 462 socket). Oh, and no more pins means the CPU is no longer in danger of being useless because one pin got broken off.
* General trend towards mainboards with tons of integrated stuff: more space, less worries about compatibility.
* Core 2 duo: Finally the CPU manufacturers discover that wasting bazillions of watts is not a smart thing to do. I am still amazed by this CPU.

So not *all* upgrades are bad.

In the classroom

[Nom du Keyboard]

I felt like I was in the classroom listening to the instructor drone on as I read this article summary. While this may be worthwhile to know, it's unexciting to the point of boring. The slownewsday tagger was correct.

Re:Modding every critical post down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew it was going to happen too, which is why I posted my questioning anonymously. I somehow wouldn't be surprised if it was Hemos doing it.

Re:Most Worthless Slashdot Post Ever?

[Vulva R. Thompson, P]

With your fit so tight
My bloody knuckles curse you
Die molex die die

Marketing

[phoenixwade]

I'm on the fence, I like the SATA connector, don't like the eSATA connector, preferring to use USB or Firewire connections for external drives.

However slashdotting an ecommerce site with an article designed to do nothing more than get a very targeted audience to a location that will sell SATA and eSATA devices is superb. It makes me wonder what the real dollar value of this "news" will translate into.

Re:Marketing

[TheRaven64]

I'd rather see drives with native FireWire controllers than SATA or eSATA. Sure, SATA gives more bandwidth, but only in theory. A single hard drive comes nowhere near close to being able to saturate a FireWire 800 link, let alone [e]SATA. On the other hand, you can plug multiple devices into a FireWire chain. I have two FireWire 800 hard disks on a shelf, and I can connect them to my laptop with a single FireWire cable. If I moved to eSATA then my laptop would need two eSATA ports, and I would need to plug in two cables. This doesn't exactly seem like a step forward.

Re:Marketing

[CoderJoe]

Um... Except that you can plug multiple drives into a single SATA2 controller port, using a hub or fan-out connector. SATA2's theoretical max rate is much higher than FireWire800, which allows you to plug in more drives before hitting the cap.

Here is one example of a SATA2 (eSATA) hub.

Let's just switch to RJ45's.

[ACMENEWSLLC]

Let's just switch to Ethernet and be done with it.

1Gb/s Ethernet = 128MB/s (1,024 megabits / 8 = 128 megabytes.) Most hard drives are hard up to push 60MB/s so that is plenty of speed + framing for most computers.

So let's just stick an Ethernet connection on the end of the drive, boot it from iSCSI, and be done with all these standards. If you still want an Internal drive, drop four Ethernet connectors onto the motherboard.

That goes for almost everything, imo. Anything I have that is USB should be RJ45. My Mouse, Keyboard, Thumbdrive, DVD Burner, you name it. My data wants to be free :)

Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.

[profplump]

It's not a bad idea, save the configuration part. How does the drive get an IP address? How does it resolve conflicts for addresses with other devices on the bus? How does your motherboard find the attached devices? If you're running iSCSI it's not just an Ethernet connector, it's a full-on TCP network. There are solutions to these problems, but they go beyond "add an Ethernet interface" -- you'd need DHCP and SLP or the likes at the very least just to get everything talking, and all embedded both on the disk and in the pre-boot environment.

You could drop iSCSI and just use layer-2 Ethernet to transfer blocks, but then you'd have to define a comm protocol for disks on layer-2 Ethernet. Not that it couldn't be done, but I'm not aware of one in common use today (at least not on commodity Ethernet hardware). I think this sort of solution is more feasible, as it's closer to the standard motherboard bus technologies, but there would have to be some motivation to develop the comm protocol and write drivers for it for both the OS and the pre-boot environment.

What's wrong with IEEE 1394 as a generic system interconnect? It has global addressing, it's hostless, it's hot-swappable, supports a large number (compared to the needs of the average desktop for example) of systems per bus, it works over reasonably long cable runs (very long if you use Cat-5 or optical connections) -- it's a lot like Ethernet in all those respects. And it's already got wide support for block access, DV streams, TCP/IP and a variety of other transports. Why do you want to invent a new block access protocol for Ethernet?

Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.

[LarsG]

You could drop iSCSI and just use layer-2 Ethernet to transfer blocks, but then you'd have to define a comm protocol for disks on layer-2 Ethernet. Not that it couldn't be done, but I'm not aware of one in common use today (at least not on commodity Ethernet hardware).

ATA over Ethernet gets you at least halfway there.

http://www.pcquest.com/content/technology/2006/106 110402.asp
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10880_11 -6106721.html

Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.

[profplump]

I wasn't aware of that -- it's an interesting idea. It's not really desktop-oriented in the current setup, but desktop use wouldn't be out of the question if you had the Ethernet controllers built-in to the disks rather than into some multi-disk enclosure.

I'd hate to connect anything other than disks via ATAoE though -- I don't have nearly enough mouse buttons to justify block-sized transfers. But a mouse that supported seek operations could be cool...

Re:Let's just switch to RJ45's.

[doodzed]

It's not a bad idea, save the configuration part. How does the drive get an IP address? How does it resolve conflicts for addresses with other devices on the bus? You use ATA over ethernet. It is in the Linux kernel and it works. http://etherdrive.com/

The drives do not need IPs or configuration. You system sees them as block devices and it just works. Want to double bandwith, put more ethernet in or faster drives.

Re:Modding every critical post down.

[phoenixwade]

You're new here, aren't you?

Re:This seems like a trend

[Raistlin77]

First SATA connectors are smaller, so they don't block airflow like ribbons

This has been long overcome by seperating the individual wires and grouping them. A quick Google search for IDE cable gives plenty of places that sell IDE cables both flat and round. Here is a page from the first site listed.

the main reason

[petermgreen]

is compliance with EMC standards, running high speed interfaces that are designed for internal use externally will almost certainly make the system non compliant (the same applies running a PC with the lid off and to many windowed cases)

does this matter? it depends! It doesn't if its for your own use and you don't have any sensitive gear arround or if you are a small fly by night firm or are just selling parts (generally standards are applied to the end product as a whole not individual parts) but any big vendors would not want to sell non compliant systems.

remember that metal case (even plastic cases have metal linings) on your PC isn't to keep RFI out, its to keep it in!

Reliability ?

[dargaud]

Related to this, can anyone tell me about the reliability of internal SATA connectors. Maybe I got shitty cables with my TYAN mobo, but if I as much as touch the cable during PC operation, the system will loose the disk and crash. The connector is flimsy. Is this a general issue or should I look for different cabbles ?

Re:Reliability ?

[tomstdenis]

That's standard, most SATA cables lack any sort of locking clip which makes them fantastically unsafe to use. My suggestion is to not move your desktop a lot. And if you do move it, check the cables first.

In my case I spent an hour or so chasing cables that would pull out, e.g. secure it to the mobo, it would pull on the drive. It didn't help that I had 4 SATA drives at the time...

If you're so inclined you could try gluing them into the mobo, then tape it to the drive. Bonus points for using duct tape, the true Canadian solution :-)

Tom

Re:Reliability ?

[Grishnakh]

Ignore the other responder to your question. Your cables suck. There's better ones available. I used to do embedded software development on a system that used 4 (or 8 or 16) SATA drives, and I've gone through a lot of different cables. Some don't attach very securely, and sound like the ones you have. Others were very secure; I could pick up the drive and move it around in operation and the connector didn't come loose. I believe some of the better cables had "Foxconn" connectors. We also found that newer cables seem to be better than the 1st-generation SATA cables.

In summary, try some different cables.

Re:Reliability ?

[mark_hill97]

I have to agree here with the sentiment about foxconn conectors. They are indeed superb, not even once have they come loose on me like some other cables.

Re:Reliability ?

[WuphonsReach]

Or find the SATA cables with metal clips on the ends.

Or do what inexpensive PC vendors did in the mid-90s... a small bead of glue from a glue gun on the connectors. (The one time I saw this, it had been done to the IDE/Floppy connectors inside the case to keep them from rattling loose.)

Sales pitch [poorly] disguised as an article

[QuietLagoon]

Funny how the link in the summary just so happens to point to site that wants to sell you stuff.

Re:Sales pitch [poorly] disguised as an article

[freeze128]

This must be your first time on the internet...

Re:This seems like a trend

[Raistlin77]

Jamming all kinds of legacy cruft onto a motherboard is of course possible, but will certainly increase the pricetag.

Not to mention that it will also increase size and decrease capability. When PCI slots were first coming into their own, most motherboards still had 1-4 ISA slots on them, leaving only enough room for 1 or 2 PCI slots.

Lag

[Gr8Apes]

The problem with ethernet connected drives is that the lag is higher than that of internal drives, which is the reason that internal drives still exist.

There are definitely things to like about this, though, as a $0.50 ethernet chip these days should be cheap enough to add transparently to almost any drive. I like the fact that ethernet cables are almost as small as SATA/SAS cables.

Re:Lag

[TheRaven64]

The problem with ethernet connected drives is that the lag is higher than that of internal drives

Ethernet over one single hop (no switching) has a latency of under 1ms. Over two cables with a switch in the middle, and adding on the overhead of IP, I get a round trip time of 0.2-0.3ms. The average seek time for a hard drive is 4-9ms. The extra latency of using ethernet would not be significant.

A lot of latency can be added by expensive protocols like SMB or NFS, but something like iSCSI can be very fast.

Re:Lag

[Short Circuit]

The problem with ethernet connected drives is that the lag is higher than that of internal drives

Ethernet over one single hop (no switching) has a latency of under 1ms. Over two cables with a switch in the middle, and adding on the overhead of IP, I get a round trip time of 0.2-0.3ms. The average seek time for a hard drive is 4-9ms. The extra latency of using ethernet would not be significant.

A lot of latency can be added by expensive protocols like SMB or NFS, but something like iSCSI can be very fast.

Your data doesn't make sense...after adding on overhead, youre round trip time drops by 70%? If you meant 1ns, that would make more sense.

Anyway, if you'd want more error protection than ethernet provides. You only get 32 bits of of CRC error protection for an arbitrarily large amount of data. (I've heard of environments that regularly throw around 32KB packets.)

In addition, Gigabit ethernet has only been defined for a couple cable types: Single-mode fiber and Cat 6 UTP. For reasons involving EM noise, Cat 6 inside a computer case would be a lost cause. Fiber cables, on the other hand, have a much larger minimum bend radius, and are expensive to boot.

Finally, one has to consider the size of the jacks. SATA, and PATA before it, were designed to fit into narrow places. Your best bet with Ethernet would be 110-block modular plugs, but then your boardspace for four drives approaches or exceeds that of two old IDE channels. I've heard about a high-density variety of 110 blocks, but I haven't had the chance to work with them.

Re:Lag

[TheRaven64]

Your data doesn't make sense...after adding on overhead, youre round trip time drops by 70%? Re-read what I said. 'Under 1ms' was the hand waving figure for ethernet, 0.2-0.3ms was the experiments figure for ethernet + IP.

Re:Lag

[cheater512]

I've got a AMD X2 server with four SATA II hard drives in RAID 5 configuration connected to my computer over gigabit ethernet.

Trust me lag isnt a problem at all. :P

0.09ms ping times mean its faster just to mount the server's drives on to my file system than to use my own hard drive.

Re:Lag

[cheater512]

Your not using Gigabit are you?

I get 0.09ms pings over Gigabit with two switches in between.
This is CAT 6 not fiber over about 20m too.

Re:Lag

[Gr8Apes]

That is cool - but think how fast that gets handed to the server that's serving you. Think about how much faster it'd be in RAID 10 (or was that 0 + 1 for Mirror + Striping)

Re:Lag

[cheater512]

I dont know about you but 200 MB/s read times is plenty fast for me.
Plus its not as wasteful as RAID 10 while keeping redundancy.

LInux Hotswap Support?

[benow]

Is hotswap support for internal SATA to eSATA connections coming? I just picked up an external eSATA/USB2 enclosure. It includes an internal to external sata adaptor. Linux does not see the insertion, but has no problem seeing the drive if inserted and powered on during boot. I know managed hotswap (ie hotswap to good SATA raid) is possible... certainly hotswap support by kernel driver must be possible also. Anyone know of plans for implementation?

Re:LInux Hotswap Support?

[rehabdoll]

It all depends on the controller. check out www.linux-ata.org for current controller-status and capabilities.

Could be...

[DrYak]

In fact, it could be :
- SATA drive with a small FW controller in the case
- IDE drive with a small FW controller so one can reuse all those old IDE drive to make backup / data transfer bricks
- IDE 2.4" or 16bit PC-Card or Compact Flash (basically the same stuff, with smaller mechanical connector each time)
- some proprietary internl drive format like the iPod ('cause Apple is fed up of people buy cheaper players and swaping drives)
- Pure FW drive
- Flash memory with it's own protocol and controller.

- mini server with SATA I, eSATA, USB2, FW800, Ether 1Gbps and Wifi a/b/g/n.

Re:Could be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure FW drive

Is this a real possibility or just a theoretical one? When FW was new and exciting I remember talk about how these drive bridges were just a temporary thing and Soon we would have pure FW drives which would be cheaper and faster and life would be Good.

And then I never heard about them again.

Are such things actually available now?

shitty MB connectors

[scharkalvin]

I had a sata connector on my asus mb break off when I pulled a drive out
and it hit the cable of another drive and broke off the mb connector.

There is no "SATA II"

[imroy]

SATA II is the old name of the organisation that created the SATA standard (although I can't find what the acronym used to stand for). It has since changed its name to SATA-IO ("International Organisation") because everyone mistook the two I's as Roman numerals and assumed the newly created SATA 3Gb/s standard was "version 2" of SATA. It's not. It's just a new signalling rate and other features like NCQ are separate.

• SATA-IO: Dispelling the Confusion: SATA II does not mean 3Gb/s
• Anandtech: What's in a name? SATA II Misconceptions

Re:There is no "SATA II"

[Richy_T]

Real smart. Like everyone isn't going to think that IO stands for Input/Output

Rich

Re:There is no "SATA II"

[imroy]

Real smart. Like everyone isn't going to think that IO stands for Input/Output

That's still better than everyone mistaking the 'II' for a Roman numeral and thinking it's "SATA 2.0". You know, like USB 2.0.

Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector?

[Doc Ruby]

SATA is a serial connection. But is there some way to put multiple SATA drives on a single SATA connection? For example, the Playstation 3 has only a single SATA connector on its motherboard, though the SATA driver chip supports 2 drives. Can a SATA RAID driver card attach two SATA drives to the single SATA connector? Or is there a SW solution?

Re:This seems like a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

DDR1 and DDR2 SDRAM are not compatible; they use completely different electrical interfaces, and have different physical interfaces so you can't plug one type of module into the other type of slot. It's entirely misleading to say they are; you might be able to build such a motherboard with different slots, but it would require extra bridge logic.

The Athlon 64's built-in memory controller even means that you can't have a DDR1 AM2 motherboard, and you can't have a DDR2 939 motherboard. The pins simply aren't available in the respective sockets. Reports are that AM2 should be able to support DDR3, however, and that future Athlon 64s supporting DDR3 will also support DDR2.

It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thou...

[dpilot]

>It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning

Do the eyes turn blue-in-blue, also?

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[rthille]

There are devices (I forget what they are called) that will do 'fan out', but you need support (drivers, maybe a special controler?) on the host (PC) to make them work.

Re:This seems like a trend

[schnikies79]

Rounded cables have nothing on SATA cables. Yes they are better than ribbon cables but they still suck. They have not terribly flexible, the plugs are still wide, the covers over the part where the cable spreads comes apart, you still have master/slave (assuming you don't get a single connector cable), etc.

I'll take SATA over rounded cables any day.

Linux PCI esata/sata300 cards

[BestNicksRTaken]

I'm looking for a SATA300 PCI card to go with my 3 or 4 SATA300 drives that are currently running on a SIL-3114 controller on my motherboard, I'd also like at least one esata port.

The only one I can find that should work with Linux seems to be this Addonics model with uses SIL-3124: http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/a dsa3r5-e.asp but I can't find it for sale anywhere in the UK/France.

This Lindy one looks like it should work too, but 86 quid is absurd: http://www.lindy.com/uk/productfolder/05/51136/ind ex.php

Does anyone know of a chipset with Linux drivers for motherboards or a PCI card? I'm not wonderfully keen on upgrading to a new motherboard (and therefore PCI-E GFX card, DDR2 RAM, processor etc.)

Re:This seems like a trend

[lattyware]

The round ones are still quite thick, and have to spread out at the end, and also half as flexible, and more damage-prone.

Overheard at the SATA connector design meeting:

[Ancient_Hacker]

"Everyone please now and listen to OverLord Amphe Knoll!" AK: "You have done well, pilgrims. The connector conspiracy advances! Let us review our proud history:

• 1938: The holy RCA Phono connector! The one that connects the center conductor FIRST and blows out the speakers with hum! Also, it has no detent so it can fall out given a light breeze! That was a goodie!
• 1941: The Ubiquitous UHF connector! The one that connects the center pin first and either blows out the receiver, or burns up the hapless HAM or CB user! Also it seems to have a detent, but there's aq 50% chance its a false fit and will wiggle loose
• 1961: The Japanese hollow tube power plug! 10001 different voltages and currents in one connector! Lotsa sales there of replacement radios.
• 1972: Of the Ma Bell RJ modular connectors, we will not speak. Anybody can make a mistake and make a sturdy, usable, latching connector once in a while. Luckily our agents infiltrated the factories and made the latches prone to snag on wires and break off after five uses. A partial recovery for the forces of connector darkness!
• 1974: 40-pin flat cable connectors: Another goal for our side! Connectors with no latching or detents, plus 180 degree ambiguity! Lots of smoke if you guess wrong!
• 1985: The Mac AppleTalk connector! Supposedly a DIN standard, but we sneaked in plenty of gotchas, like no detent and easily confused with and smashed into the DIN 3 connector!
• 2003: The SATA connector! A home run! No useful grounding, no shielding, and it falls out if you just look at it!
• 2006: External SATA connector: Well,a partial win. A few improvements got sneaked in. Our hope is the users will confuse the old and new styles and break off some disk drive pins. No soup for anybody until you dream up a new SATA3 connector with more confounding features. I'm thinking: explosions, or at least melt-downs

Re:Overheard at the SATA connector design meeting:

[Richy_T]

1961: The Japanese hollow tube power plug! 10001 different voltages and currents in one connector! Lotsa sales there of replacement radios.

Not to mention comes in a dozen or so slightly different dimensions including some that are almost-but-not-quite the right size but work if you angle the plug.

1972: Of the Ma Bell RJ modular connectors, we will not speak. Anybody can make a mistake and make a sturdy, usable, latching connector once in a while. Luckily our agents infiltrated the factories and made the latches prone to snag on wires and break off after five uses. A partial recovery for the forces of connector darkness!

Round these parts, the phone co attempts to make up for it by installing a socket box with a spring loaded cover which means you need two hands to insert or remove the thing.

1974: 40-pin flat cable connectors: Another goal for our side! Connectors with no latching or detents, plus 180 degree ambiguity! Lots of smoke if you guess wrong!

And let's not forget the floppy connector which frequently didn'd have any kind of enclosure leading to off-by-one errors whilst fumbling around inside low-visibility cases.

2003: The SATA connector! A home run! No useful grounding, no shielding, and it falls out if you just look at it!

Also fragile and prone to breakage.

Rich

Re:Overheard at the SATA connector design meeting:

[Richy_T]

Where does that two-pin connector that is used in AC adaptors come in? The one which lets you choose which end connector and which has absolutely no kind of retention other than friction and hope and, because it is reversible, when it does fall out, you have to hope you are plugging it back in the right way or that your equipment has reverse polarity protection (That one has to get my vote for #1 worst connector ever).

Rich

Re:Overheard at the SATA connector design meeting:

[TheGratefulNet]

I don't know the date, but DEC took the MJ and made an MMJ (modified modular jack). an rj45 with an off-center tab, used mostly for terminals (never for ethernet, but always for asych rs232 style comms).

DECconnect. aaah. that takes me back.

but which controllers work in Linux

[Skapare]

I've already been bitten by a SATA controller that didn't work in Linux (2.6.16 or so at the time). I got a list of chipsets that are supported by Linux (main source tree). But that doesn't help because I'm not buying chipsets ... I want to by a few controller cards. And now they need to be ones with eSATA connectors.

Re:but which controllers work in Linux

[bill_mcgonigle]

I wound up with a PCI SIIG card because their PCI Express card worked well. No such luck. The PCI version has:

02:0a.0 SATA controller: Initio Corporation INI-1623 PCI SATA-II Controller (rev 02)

which has no current linux driver. An experimental driver is due in 2.6.21.

Apparently Initio is uncooperative with the devs, so avoid products with their chipsets. SIIG didn't respond to my mail asking about drivers before I did the research myself. So, they're going to be avoided as well.

3Ware has been great, but $$$. Buy theirs if budget isn't a big concern. I'm interested in knowing about any reliable no-frills cards with driver support, I don't need the RAID features of the 3Ware.

Mod parent up [was Re:Umm, blatant advertising...]

[HRbnjR]

I have been hangin out at this site for a while, and this "article" really tips the balance for me.

I mean, I know a lot of people bash Slashdot, but come on... I can't imagine this not having been paid for. Actually, this is even worse if it _wasn't_ paid for.

Either way, I'm pretty certain this isn't the kind of compelling content that will continue to bring me back here. :(

Re:Modding every critical post down.

[JohnnyDoh]

I seem to recall seeing other posts criticizing horrible threads. Perhaps I read them before they were modded into oblivion.

Patents

[wonkavader]

Ok, when SATA first came out, I was told the cables were really expensive because there was a patent on the connector, and tthere were a very limited number of cable makers able to make them, and they were ALL EXPENSIVE.

Same situation? Are these cables going to be $40 for a 2ft cable?

Is anyone here well versed on the patents on the original one and what happened to bring the prices down?

Re:This seems like a trend

[Grishnakh]

One other thing I wonder about. I thought that Intel also switched to PCI-express, DDR2, and SATA. Perhaps I was mistaken and Intel is a backwards company and use slower technology with their faster processors. Bear in mind that only applies to Intel motherboards, since it's the chipset that determines compatibility with most of that stuff.

No, Intel is very anti-legacy. They switched to DDR2 long before AMD did, mainly because their crappy P4 processors were more dependent on memory bandwidth (which is why they initially used RAMBUS) to keep their loooonnngg pipelines full. They moved to PCIe on their chipsets early on too. And SATA's been a big problem in Intel chipsets too: they've been so big on the SATA bandwagon that they've entirely eliminated PATA from their chipsets. Their first SATA chipsets had only one PATA channel, for the optical drive that everyone has which is still PATA, and this was a big pain for people who still had some PATA hard drives. Now their newest chipsets don't have PATA at all, which is a bigger pain because SATA DVD+-R drives are still quite rare and expensive. I like SATA, but eliminating still-useful legacy interfaces that quickly is just dumb. (As a result, the latest motherboards usually have JMicron PATA chips added on to add the PATA functionality back.)

Re:It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thou

[Hoi Polloi]

Only if I add spice to my coffee

You've never met my mother-in-law

[whyde]

I'd love to introduce you to my mother-in-law. Over Christmas a year ago, she explained that she was having trouble getting her email since she switched to cable modem service from dial-up. Upon inspection, I found that she had conveniently inserted the USB cable into her DB9 serial port, which fit quite well if you're absolutely unaware of how it's supposed to work. The computer didn't have a USB port at all, or an Ethernet port, but that's what was supported by the cable modem.

Don't assume that all physical connectors being different guarantees that end-users won't outsmart them.

Re:You've never met my mother-in-law

[bobbozzo]

At a former job, we had a customer screaming at us that their new computer's keyboard didn't work (after having had it at the shop for another issue).

Turns out they plugged the PS/2 keyboard cable into a BNC/10base2 connector on the NIC. Fit perfectly :p

Is this a new technical term?

[BancBoy]

A few times I've given one of the computers the reach-around

I don't want to know what devices are being mounted in this scenario!

NOT OFFTOPIC!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that was unjustified that they modded you down. The article links directly to a commercial site selling the product in question. Not a news story. Not a standards page. Not an article from a technology commentator. It's a site who's only purpose is to sell. It would be idiotic to not ask the question you did.

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[Overzeetop]

You are correct. You can do 5 ports to one in certain circumstances...there are some bridge boards here which will do this. There are some controllers which do not support the muilt-drive option.

Good point

[TimmyDee]

I had a user once take the power plug for her Zip drive (a standard AC to DC adapter) and plug it into the headphone jack on her iMac.

Brilliant! Unfortunately, smoke and fire was not the result. Lesson unlearned.

Links pls?

[Sodade]

I have this same problem with SATA cables and have a fairly modern case. The case has drive bays, but no built in connectors. Could you provide links to some examples?

Re:Modding every critical post down.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a mechanism now for modding the story itself. Even stories that are approved can be voted upon on the Firehose. (Last I checked, access was not universal.)

Whether that would have any effect upon the story or others like it is a question worth answering, IMACO (in my Anonymous-Cowardly opinion). Unless of course whoever is modding things Offtopic can also influence a story's vote on the Firehose.

locking SATA connectors

[juventasone]

Intel realized this problem very early on, and by their second generation of SATA-equipped desktop motherboards, they had implemented locking connectors on the boards and included cables. This is still a standard feature on all their desktop boards. However, only one end is locking, the drive end is normal, probably because drive manufacturers haven't completely standardized the housing of their SATA connectors.

I see some other motherboard manufacturers are doing this with some models as well now. There's even cables locking on both ends, but I don't understand how they can work across all drives.

The whole thing stinks. It wouldn't of taken an engineering genius to see this problem during development of the spec. At the very least they could of made it part of a future spec, namely SATA 2.0. I saw the problem within the first few uses, why couldn't they? The problem is almost identical to AGP, where the cards and slots didn't have a locking mechanism for the first year or more. Slowly board manufacturers starting creating a variety of their own locking mechanisms but often (especially earlier on) they didn't function with certain cards, or at worst, actually prevented you from seating the card.

Re:locking SATA connectors

[CoderJoe]

Drives cannot provide locking mechanisms, other than tabs that a cable can lock into. Otherwise you can't use the drive with any of the multitude of SATA or SAS hot-swap backplanes (usually purchased in an enclosure). If the drive had locking tabs on the connector, once you plugged the drive into the backplane, you'd never get it out again, without breaking something.

Of course they forgot...

[MichailS]

... the power supply.

The reason why Firewire still kicks ass, while USB harddrives require you to find two independently powered USB ports and use a split cable.. And can't power a 3.5" HDD even then.

Would it had been so hard to include the SATA power line together with the signal connector?

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire cables are available in various lengths! Originally, they were only available in one size and with the big 6 pin connector, but now you can get 4 pin cables.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=firewire+cable &hl=en&btnG=Search

Breaking news:

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=socks&btnG=Sea rch+Froogle

Socks are available for purchase.....on the internet.

Firehose

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it seems votes on approved stories on the Firehose don't stick. Tagging it "nix" doesn't stick while "nixnix" does but doesn't affect its orange ranking.

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[Master of Transhuman]

Yes, it's called port multiplication. You can get two- to twelve-bay eSATA enclosures with onboard electronics to do up to four-to-one (maybe more) fan-in that allows one four-port eSATA card to control up to 12 SATA drives in the enclosure.

Very nice for large cheap storage needs - you can put 6-9 TB of storage - using 500-750GB SATA drives - in one box controlled by one controller card in the host PC. 500GB SATA drives are going for under $200 these days.

I have a client who needs about 9TB of storage space. Right now he's using up his Firewire ports on one box, I've recommended he just get any box (all it has to do is act as an archive, not even a file server) plus a multi-bay eSATA enclosure and eSATA controller cards. Much cheaper than any SAN alternative.

By the way, anybody notice this doesn't even

[Master of Transhuman]

come close to being an "article".

It's a frikkin' ADVERTISEMENT.

Nice that it spawned a nice discussion of hardware, but c'mon, you could have done that with a simple "What about SATA connectors" question made up from somebody who doesn't even exist.

Is BIOS setup for SATA and not "IDE mode?"

[MojoStan]

I have an eSATA external drive. My current mobo doesn't have eSATA built in, but I use it via a SATA to eSATA adapter card in my PC...

Only catch is if I hook up a drive while in Windows with that converter, it'll lockup. Has to be turned on before I boot the computer. This is a limitation of the adapter; from what I've read, you should be able to hot swap with a "real" eSATA port.

Another possible reason for your inability to hot-swap is that the SATA ports might be set to "IDE mode" in the motherboard's BIOS. This is a common setup on "home-built" computers since "IDE mode" allows pre-Vista Windows installation without the "F6 (floppy) installation method." To enable hot-swap, the SATA ports must be set to "SATA/AHCI mode" in the BIOS.

Here's some instructions from Intel's site on changing SATA modes on their motherboards:

• Troubleshooting Serial ATA / RAID Issues - SATA Modes (AHCI; Hot Swap)
  The SATA controller has three modes of operation:
  • IDE mode - no AHCI, no RAID
  • SATA mode (sometimes called AHCI mode) - AHCI enabled, no RAID
  • RAID mode - AHCI enabled, RAID enabled
  AHCI mode also allows for Hot Swapping drives.

Can't forget USB

[Kuvter]

1996: USB. It's got only one way to fit in the slot so most of the time you just guess if you have it facing the right way. If you didn't have it facing the right way you have to flip it around and try to jam it in the other way.

2000: USB 2.0 Faster than USB, but still only works if you plug it in the right direction.

Re:Can't forget USB

[loraksus]

Don't forget the color of the plastic in the connectors is usually black, making it damn near impossible to see which way is the right way if you're in the dark.

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks - that's exactly what I'm looking for. Another, related problem is getting over 1TB of 160GB EIDE drives into the cheapest enclosure, whether connected to a host by EIDE, USB or ethernet. It needs a chassis, power supply, and EIDE (and maybe adapter to USB or ethernet) connector.

And as long as you mention FireWire, do you happen to know any adapter (under $100) that plugs a FireWire drive into a USB port? The PS3 has no FireWire, but I have a FireWire drive I want to use.

Re:Umm, blatant advertising...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the 'business reason for Linux' post?

Re:Mod parent up [was Re:Umm, blatant advertising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody comes for the articles. If you want articles, there's plenty of magazines out there.

However, we do come for the discussion about the articles. I've learned lots from reading the corrections to several "paid-for" articles here.

FireWire

[DragonHawk]

"The speed is definitely faster than USB."

I recently read a comparison of USB 2.0 vs FireWire 800 vs eSATA, in the "April 2007" issue of "Maximum PC". (That is magazine time, which is shifted one month ahead of real-time.) They found eSATA and FireWire 800 were about the same in performance (eSATA was marginally faster, but within a few percent). USB sucked mud.

I think it's such a shame that FireWire enjoys such limited adoption. Here was a standard that could be everything. Proper device discovery and management. High-speed, real-time, guaranteed bandwidth for things that need it, like disk drives and video cameras. Multiple hubs and daisy-chains let it work for mice, keyboards, joysticks, all that stuff. A true peer-to-peer design, so you can hook multiple PCs together for small ad hoc networks. Rather than USB, Ethernet, and eSATA, we could have had just FireWire.

It's a pity Apple killed it with their control-freak attitude. By the time they came around, Intel had pushed USB down everyone's throats.

Re:FireWire

[AbRASiON]

I find that very hard to beleive.

Firewire and USB might CLAIM all kinds of speeds but in real world performance they are capable of approximately 25mbytes per second sustained.

E-sata however is like a real normal sata port on the motherboard hanging out the back of the PC - depending on the drive you should comfortably see 50mbytes a second sustained.

But where was the bottleneck?

[DragonHawk]

"I read a hardware test where Firewire and eSATA were compared. They were close to the same speed for single drives, but once you start adding drives, eSATA pulls away from Firewire pretty quickly."

Any idea on specifics? It occurs to me that it's likely that they probably used a single FireWire host adapter, because Firewire allows that. At the same time, they probably used multiple eSATA ports, because most eSATA gear doesn't allow anything else. So you're comparing a bunch of FireWire drives sharing a single I/O path, vs a bunch of eSATA drives, each with a dedicated I/O path.

Re:But where was the bottleneck?

[Master of Transhuman]

I think the point was that if you use a single cable for both Firewire and eSATA, Firewire tops out at 800Mbps, whereas eSATA goes as high as 3Gbps. On a single drive, which is limited by its hardware and bus speed, it doesn't matter which one you use. When you have multiple drives on the channel, the channel capacity becomes the limiting factor, and eSATA simply scales higher than Firewire.

This is why there is more effort being put into manufacturing larger and fancier eSATA enclosures than there is in Firewire enclosures. You see ten- and 12-bay eSATA enclosures, not so many Firewire (and USB) which tend to be two and four-bay enclosures.

AGP is not a bus

[DragonHawk]

"one slot per bus you can have more then one AGP bus"

AGP = Accelerated Graphics Port. It's not a bus. (I'm being pedantic, I know.)

That's why most everything has only one AGP slot. Since it is a point-to-point link, you can only have one slot per AGP controller. Two AGP slots (two ports) would mean two controllers, which would mean some fairly high-end silicon.

I wasn't aware of anything that has more than one AGP port, but Wikipedia told me about the AlphaServer GS1280 (from HP nee Compaq nee DEC). Cool. I love esoteric hardware. :)

Round cables suck

[DragonHawk]

Rounded cables have nothing on SATA cables. Yes they are better than ribbon cables but they still suck. They have not terribly flexible, the plugs are still wide, the covers over the part where the cable spreads comes apart, you still have master/slave (assuming you don't get a single connector cable), etc.

You left out: Most "round-ribbon" cables are crap, because the manufactures have never heard about things like shielding.

(Sure, there are some good ones, but they cost a fortune. Meanwhile, I get to do trouble-shooting with a system that doesn't work because it's got crap cables, which the owner assures me are fine because they came from CompUSA...)

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[rahvin112]

What you are talking about is called an SATA Backplane. Just like a SCSI Backplane.

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[Master of Transhuman]

A quick Google shows no such thing as a Firewire to USB adapter. Apparently this isn't feasible according to an article I saw via the Google. The only such adapter I saw via a Google is some thing designed to convert digital video signals from Firewire to USB.

I don't think there's any easy way to get large numbers of IDE drives in an external enclosure except of course for single or dual drives in USB enclosures. First, IDE is intended for internal use, much like SATA - except SATA being a serial protocol, you can find a way to extend that. IDE is parallel, which doesn't go very far. You can find PC towers with ten bays like this one . Then all you need is some mounting kits if your drives are 3.5" to fit them into the 5.25" bays.

Your other issue with trying to use an external enclosure for IDE drives is how to control them - you'd need ten USB connectors at least, or some way to fan the ports in like eSATA can. I don't think there are very many enclosures set up for IDE like that - most are for eSATA.

You CAN get stuff like Firewire to IDE enclosures like this one. That might do for your needs. Or this USB for IDE four-bay enclosure.

But most of the big enclosures I see via Google are for eSATA. eSATA is designed for this - IDE never was.

Re:Multiple SATA Drives on a Single SATA Connector

[Master of Transhuman]

Backplanes in the classic sense tended to be for rackmount stuff. This is about external enclosures that aren't rack mounted. Although I see from a quick Google that the term is now being applied to SATA external enclosures as well.

But some manufacturers just refer to port multiplication without using the term backplane. I suppose there is a technical point which distinguishes port multiplication from backplanes. Presumably backplanes provide more capabilities than just port fan-in. I'm not that deep into the hardware to know.

FW on drives

[DrYak]

I've heard about FW flaash thumb drives. (Just like the USB stick, but FW instead).

But I doubt that we'll ever see hard disks with FW connectors, because maintaining several different connectors is always more expensive, and currently there's already several of them :
- You have SATA (the current 'standart')
- You have IDE that is still produced by a lot of manufacturer (for retro compatibility)
- You have SCSI for the server market (although the drives themseselves aren't the same. Usuall they have smaller density platters, but spinning at higher speeds).

So FW800 (or USB2) would introduce an unecessary supplementary product variation. For every (or most) produced models, in addition to selling them with a IDE host and a SATA host, you'll have to also sell a third variation with one more different PCB stuck on it. Thus additional work for managing stock, produced volumes, etc.
Plus FW (and more so FW800) isn't that much widespread. SATA and IDE are the current and past standarts. You're bound to see them on any standart computer. Whereas, there are a lot of cheapo MoBo / beige-box / low cost Dells, that don't come with FW at all. So FW is rare and has a small market share of people who don't have a high demand with deeper pocket (like SCSI) and who will in most case have SATA (or IDE).

Flash is different and easier : manufacturer usually produce only NAND chips, they don't have . It's then up to the manufacturer of the drive to put the needed electronics around the chips. And there are already plenty of them : Compact Flash, SD and all smaller variation of it, MMC, Sony Memory Stick, xD, USB, ... Most of theme also are present in 100% of all computers, so manufacturer are used to small target markets (some even continue to produce SmartMedia cards !). So adding FW to the list isn't that much more work to do.

eSATA's a lifesaver for older Macs!

[Mr. Cancelled]

I have an older (but not too old) dual G-5 Mac. Nice box, and still very relevent speed/performance-wise.

I found out last year, after purchasing 2 150GB Raptor drives, that the older G-5's don't support the newer SATA drives. You can Google on the subject for more info, but suffice it to say that Raptors & older G-5 Macs are by no means a guaranteed thing. It seems to work for some, but many find it highly unreliable. As it turns out, the Mac chipset doesn't fully support the SATA standard, and thus doesn't support some of the newer drives coming out.

After cursing Steve Jobs and his short-sighted engineers, I stopped staring at my expensive, unusable drives, and did some research, eventually opting to go the eSATA route by purchasing a 4-port Firmtek eSATA card. After all, I'm a Mac owner these days, and historically the mantra of the Mac owners is "If something doesn't work as it should, throw more money at it". And so I did. But it was a good decision to make - This card's pretty amazing, and lets me boot off my Raptors, rather than making me reply on the slower drives inside the Mac. Additionally, you can combine multiple cards to run even more drives, if needed.

I admit that the vendors don't make it easy to get up to speed on eSATA though. Too many offer competing products, with various external connectors and terms (SATA, SATA II, eSATA, external SATA). Some vendors are also selling eSATA to SATA adapters. I appreciate consumers having choices, but would rather see a vendor specialize in one area, rather than trying to sell something for every possible option, when it comes to this kinda stuff.

After settling on a eSATA adapter, I took a quick trip to Cooldrives to get a nice external case, and voila! In my situation, it's allowed me to avoid the upgrade cycle for a few more years by letting me take advantage of the latest in drives, without requiring me to upgrade to a newer, more-compatible Mac. And the performance... Let's just say that my Mac's never been faster.

Re:eSATA's a lifesaver for older Macs!

[Builder]

But can you boot off of your shiny new SATA controller ? Last I checked , there wasn't a single SATA II controller available for the G5 range of macs that you can boot from.

This, combined with Apple deprecating the entire IR stack, leaving one of my devices unusable is slowly but surely driving me back to Linux.

Re:eSATA's a lifesaver for older Macs!

[Mr. Cancelled]

But can you boot off of your shiny new SATA controller ? Last I checked , there wasn't a single SATA II controller available for the G5 range of macs that you can boot from.

Follow that link in my original post - I boot off my Raptor via this add-in card daily. My Mac's SATA controller's only used for a couple of older internal 160GB drives I have raided together for file storage

SATA can be annoying

[AbRASiON]

I have six SATA devices and honestly it begins to become just as messy as PATA cables!

6 individual cables which are difficult to bend / shape since they are quite a thick cable - all from the board to 6 independant devices.
OR 3 ribbon cables just stopping at 2 points on the way (PATA) ? :(

Also you can't darn well put them in by feel anymore - which really sucks a lot.
I loved being able to put in a PATA cable just by feel - in awkward spots.
Also the connectors are more delicate on the drives, admitedly if you're not an idiot it should be ok but accidents happen - whereas with PATA you might crack the plastic sorrounding the pins but it's fine.
SATA you can break off the entire sata connector.

Finally yes, some of them do #$^T!ing well simply 'fall off' - I happen to use gigabyte cables they supply with their boards, they come with a small metal clip which clicks and locks them in luckily.

FireWire performance specifics

[DragonHawk]

I find that very hard to beleive.

"Maximum PC" magazine. April 2007 (Volume 12, Number 4). Article "Face-Off". Page 28. Section title "The Fastest Connection", subtitle, "FireWire 800 vs. USB vs eSATA".

Comparing FireWire 800 and eSATA, based on the information in the article:

Random access seek times (milliseconds): 8.3 for eSATA, 8.1 for FireWire 800
Average sustained read speed (megabytes/second): 77.9 for eSATA, 76.0 for FireWire 800
Maximum burst speed (megabytes/second): 128.8 for eSATA, 87.9 for FireWire 800

Believe what you want to believe.

Re:FireWire performance specifics

[AbRASiON]

Oh well........ gee.. that's surprising.

Your numbers match what I'd expect of ESata- I mistook your post as claiming ESATA is as "slow as" firewire - those are fantastic figures for firewire.

Very shocked to see FW800 capable of that (specs be damned, I'm talking real world figures)

Don't know about CPU overhead, I know USB2 totally sucks but yeah those figures are quite good then.