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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."
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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?
Damn...and I just bought a USB-SATA bridge to replace my obsolete USB-IDE bridge.
Curse you, Sabrent!
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Errr, is someone pushing their product here?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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.
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.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Oh four pin molex;
With your twin ground connections;
You're so down to earth.
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/
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
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.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
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.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
AGP was only fast one way pci-e is fast for bandwidth both ways.
With your fit so tight
My bloody knuckles curse you
Die molex die die
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.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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
You're new here, aren't you?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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.
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.
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!
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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 ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Funny how the link in the summary just so happens to point to site that wants to sell you stuff.
Simply put; AGP was a stop-gap fix for the PCI problem, PCI-Express is a true solution.
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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.
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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?
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).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
>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?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
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.
Gone!
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.
a dsa3r5-e.asp but I can't find it for sale anywhere in the UK/France.
d ex.php
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/
This Lindy one looks like it should work too, but 86 quid is absurd: http://www.lindy.com/uk/productfolder/05/51136/in
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.)
#include <sig.h>
The round ones are still quite thick, and have to spread out at the end, and also half as flexible, and more damage-prone.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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?
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.)
Only if I add spice to my coffee
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
I don't want to know what devices are being mounted in this scenario!
[UID-HeinzIntel]
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
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?
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.
... 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?
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.
AT&ROFLMAO
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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:
- 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.TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
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.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
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.
--
make install -not war
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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...)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What you are talking about is called an SATA Backplane. Just like a SCSI Backplane.
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I've heard about FW flaash thumb drives. (Just like the USB stick, but FW instead).
... 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.
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,
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
"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.
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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
Envisioned? SCSI keyboards existed. Thanks to all that is holy that THAT idea got nixed.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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).
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.
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.