Spec Will Cut External Drive Power Cords

Lucas123 writes "The Serial ATA International Organization just revealed that it is well along the way to finishing a specification that would remove separate power cords to external SATA drives or optical disk drives, allowing them to draw power from the host system. The resulting new cable, being called Power Over eSATA, will be compatible with the existing eSATA connector and support the current maximum interface transfer rate of 3Gb/s. The SATA organization expects the new cables to be released later this year to drive makers."

Comments

Cables

[ackthpt]

I wish they'd do something about this piss-poor connectors. I've had a number of them fail and had to junk them because they do not make a good solid connection, nothing prevents vibration from letting them slip.

Re:Cables

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you are not properly placing your vibrator?

Re:Cables

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

They also snap off and break! The piece of shit plastic slot on the hard drives, snaps off with ease.

The durability of Sata connectors suck.

Re:Cables

[TheRaven64]

and a non-native interface Every single interface since IDE and SCSI have been non-native. That's what Integrated Drive Electronics means. The controller no longer sends native commands like 'move disk head' and 'read bytes' it sends abstract commands like 'read block 1406.' Your on disk controller translates these in to native commands. It is no harder to build a device that accepts FireWire commands directly and translates them in to native commands than it is to build one that understands SCSI or SATA. Most current FireWire drives go via SCSI or ATA because there is a much bigger demand for ATA drives than FireWire, but FireWire commands are almost identical to SCSI commands so such a drive could easily be built.

Should have been in the spec from day 1

[krog]

Seriously -- it's two more pins. Why wasn't the spec designed right in the first place?

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[Daimanta]

Because it would require thinking and *gasp* some work.

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[RingDev]

It could have been a political issue in the industry as well. If there was strong opposition to any specific power over SATA spec, it could have held up the spec. Where as, going live with the widely accepted standard, and gaining a foothold, the spec now has the power to determine what the manufacturers should do as opposed to the other way around.

-Rick

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[jo42]

Why wasn't the spec designed right in the first place? Because most of the time, the people that write these specs, or design this stuff, don't seem to use any products in the real world...

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[WarlockD]

Maybe because of the fact that some drives use both 5v and 12v. Or that the 3.3v (does any drive use that yet?) was needed

To be honest, I don't even see if its possible for internal drives 3.5. Most of those drives use upwards of an amp off the 12v, and pushing 12watts down a little sata cable sounds like it would cause interference. Heck, it also means we have to add yet another 12v rail to the motherboard to support the power. It would be nice, however, for it on the eSATA connector. But thats the only time I would say it would be that useful.

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[krog]

Of course proper shielding is necessary, but if you're in a position to design a cable which will support throughput of 3Gb/s, you are in a position to supply power in the same package. In practice, crosstalk from other data cables is a much greater problem than interference on the power supply rail. (Disclaimer: I'm an analog EE; I think about this crap.)

Re:Should have been in the spec from day 1

[Znork]

I can easily think of actual technical issues on this one.

See, historically, disks have had their power supported by the PSU directly. Now you want to replace IDE and put SATA connectors on the motherboard. That's fine. Then you want the SATA connectors to supply power enough to drive one disk? Ok... Then you want the SATA connectors to supply enough power to drive four disks? That's an 80W or more power bus over the motherboard; motherboard manufacturers had just about gotten over having to add new power connectors for CPU's and partly for PCIe, and now you want them to take the hit for disk power too, and presumably do some engineering for it too, (such as stabilizing the power so your computer doesn't crash as parts of the MB loses power when the disk spins up)?

Call it political or call it technical, but in this case it was probably not just simply adding the connectors that was the problem (you could have gotten around the issue by placing a PSU connector next to any SATA contact, of course, but imagine the bitching about that).

Re:Obligatory remark...

[krog]

No one obligated you to say something that threadbare and devoid of humor. No one. You did it on your own.

no excuse

[krog]

USB has supported bus power forever. There's a protocol (devices can use up to 100mA without asking, up to 500mA with host device permission) and it works. eSATA, a newer spec, did not learn from this??

Re:no excuse

[RingDev]

...did not learn from this?? No idea, but a political argument theory holds more water than a "because they're dumb" theory IMO.

-Rick

Re:no excuse

[Firethorn]

That's ok; USB isn't designed to power heavy loads. 2.5W (5V x 500mA) is enough to spin a hard drive

It's enough to spin up a laptop HD, but not enough for the cheaper and higher storage but larger3.5" desktop type drives.

Thus those drives need supplimental power, which is still annoying.

I'd have been happier with a limit around 12 watts, which is enough to power a 7200RPM HD, though you might need a capaciter to limit current draw during peaks.

12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two), and you wouldn't be limited to trickle charging quite as many devices, or needing auxillery power sources for as many items.

You might even be able to operate an energy-efficient(if slow) laptop inkjet printer off of that.

Re:no excuse

[ScrappyLaptop]

Never attribute to incompetence that which you can attribute to managment best practices.

Re:no excuse

[Znork]

12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two)

Multiply it by 4 for sata and 4-8 for USB, and you would, however, have a noticably thicker motherboard (and/or separate PSU connectors and caps beside the USB and SATA connectors).

It's most likely not the cable that's the problem but the actual electronics that have to support the rated draw of the cable. Or worse, imagine having motherboards that dont support the rated draw and having users calling tech support with 'my computer crashed as I inserted my USB cupwarmer and the keyboard with LCD display and cooling fan at once!!!'.

You'd end up having to have a calculator to figure out what devices you could actually attach to your computer at any one time. Much as I'm loath to say it, I prefer the wallwarts over that.

USB? Firewire?

[snib]

I guess I don't understand the value of eSATA. I don't see many eSATA drives, and I don't see many eSATA ports on computers or devices. Do we really need to add yet another port to laptops, in addition to the audio in/out, multimedia card, USB, Firewire, VGA, DVI, S-Video, Serial, Ethernet, Modem, etc etc? Wouldn't it make more sense to start eliminating ports and making everything work over USB, or Firewire, or some other spec?

As far as the article, it looks like a neat new development, but I know that you can get power over USB and Firewire. Maybe not enough for an external hard drive (I don't know), but IMHO it makes more sense to upgrade the power capabilities of universal technologies rather than promoting an exclusively hard drive-related format.

Re:USB? Firewire?

[jandrese]

I think the advantage is supposed to be cost and speed. eSATA is faster than USB and Firewire (I think, dunno about the latest Firewire) and requires absolutely _no_ on board logic to work. With this new spec an external eSATA case is literally a metal box with a hole in it, maybe a passthrough connector if they're feeling swanky. They don't even need the transformer anymore. That makes it cheaper than USB and especially firewire.

Re:USB? Firewire?

[Solra Bizna]

FireWire is a fairly general-purpose specification, designed so that devices that require a fixed (and quite large) amount of bandwidth can be guaranteed it, and designed with device-to-device communication in mind. Its maximum bandwidth is 400Mbps (unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it).

SATA is a storage-device-oriented specification, designed pretty much so that drives can pump data over it as fast as they can read it, with a centralized paradigm and a much higher peak bandwidth at 1.5Gbps (or 3Gbps, but see the note about FW800 above).

Using USB for storage devices is perverted and wrong; it's synchronous, so your practical bandwidth is limited by the length of your cable and the response time of the nodes at either side. On the other hand, a design like that is pretty great for things like user input devices, which is one reason nobody ever talks about making FireWire mice.

So, in summary, SATA is more suitable for disks than FireWire, and USB is dog-slow. Any questions?

-:sigma.SB

Re:USB? Firewire?

[TheRaven64]

unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it FireWire 800 has been around for ages. My old PowerBook (4 years old) and my 'new' MacBook Pro (1 year old) both support it and I have had two external LaCie hard drives for three years which have two FireWire 800 ports which allow drives to be chained together.

The spec has allowed 3200Mb/s over fibre for years but I've not seen any consumer products supporting it. The latest version of the spec (just approved) supports 3200Mb/s over the same cables and connectors as existing FireWire 800 systems.

Re:USB? Firewire?

[waveformwafflehouse]

"unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it"

Two Firewire 800 devices that I use every day:

Lacie external drives http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10922

RME Fireface 800 http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_fireface_800.php

While they don't use the full bandwidth individually, it's nice to be able to chain without worrying about audio/video dropouts.

So does coupling power with data restrict the potential to chain SATA devices in the future when the bandwidth out paces the drives?

How about for internal drives as well?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well? Things are better now that IDE cables are less common, but I'd still be happy for a cleaner interior of my cases.

Re:How about for internal drives as well?

[poot_rootbeer]

Is there much of a reason that we couldn't have single power+data connectors for internal HDD / DVD drives as well?

Nostalgia? The big ol' 4-pin Molex power connectors are practically the only thing inside a PC case that are still the same as they were when IBM first introduced them to the desktop twenty-seven years ago. If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.

Re:How about for internal drives as well?

[MrNemesis]

Think of every 12V line going into every hard drive in your machine. Now think of every 12V line having to be routed through the motherboard.

It essentially won't happen because it'll make motherboards much more complicated (read: expensive). That said, power-over-SATA shoudl have been in the e-SATA spec from the beginning, glad I didn't hop on the bandwagon earlier.

Re:At least its not Power Over SATA

[theRiallatar]

You say POSATO, I say POSATA.

Wha-d-ya-mean "power cable?"

[DanQuixote]

One of my tech support calls was about 1980, my friend's mom had a computer, and she bought a printer, which she tried to hook up herself, but it wasn't working.

I went over there and quickly spied the problem... the data cable was connected, but there was no power cable hooked up.

She quite innocently and logically asked, "why do I need a separate power cable?"

People don't really give a damn that the power system and the data system are two separate systems. It really is completely reasonable for them to expect a single cable to power as well as communicate.

These folks shouldn't pat themselves on the back for a "new feature", they should try harder next time to close a bug out in something much less than 30 years!

This is a basic usability requirement that people persistantly ignore despite the rat's nests of cables running around all their gear. This is certainly one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of USB!

Re:Wha-d-ya-mean "power cable?"

[harrkev]

She quite innocently and logically asked, "why do I need a separate power cable?"

Does she also plug her cable feed (or sattelite receiver) into her television and expect it to work without plugging the TV into 120V?

Re:Wha-d-ya-mean "power cable?"

[DanQuixote]

Clearly you are a good engineer, and as every good engineer knows, it's all about trade-offs. If Tesla had his way, there would indeed NOT be a separate power cord for the TV.

Overall historically, we've made pretty good decisions about how to handle power. However, in the last 10 years I have been very disappointed with consumer electronics. Powering a device is a major requirement for anything we design, yet batteries still suck, wall-warts continue to proliferate, mp3 players don't charge via a standard USB port, and I STILL have to plug every last item into it's own special power cord, despite the inconvenience.

<rant>Why is power still an after-thought during product or specification design???!!!</rant>

Re:Wha-d-ya-mean "power cable?"

[Frenchy_2001]

"why do I need a separate power cable?"
because most computer systems are not designed to provide the few amps of current that a laser printer can need?
Because most of those interface are designed for low power peripherals and have specs mirroring that (USB for example can feed 0.5A into its own cable), but more powerful peripherals get plugged into it. So, to work, they need more power and get an external adapter.

The *REAL* problem comes from people unable (or, much more likely unwilling) to follow directions. Most recent piece of equipment, be them electronics or computer peripherals include a quick plug guide, but those people will NOT read it.
My wife is one of them. She will NOT follow any instruction, but will then complain loudly that it does not work. Packages get ripped open and manuals discarded to the side while she tries to figure out the way to use it, gets frustrated after 5 minutes and complain it wont work. She will not open a manual, no matter what amount of frustration she will endure.

Is that new spec good and interesting? Sure, but then dont complain that you get crashes on your computer, because that new magic peripheral just pushed your power supply over its limit (most brand computer has very little overhead in its power supply).

Existing power situation with SATA is hilarious

[dwalsh]

Parallel ATA (A.K.A IDE): Big Parallel data cable with a shitload of pins. 4 pin power cable.

Serial ATA: Serial data cable with just 7 pins. Power cable has twice as many pins!

Did they just move the lines to the power cable? :-)

Re:Existing power situation with SATA is hilarious

[Gat0r30y]

7 pins, but just 4 wires going in (unless you got a 3.3V line too which is not necessary on the bulk of SATA drives). The 7 pins make it hot swapable, you can just yank power to a drive, and it doesn't hose the whole thing. I do failure analysis on hard drives all day (its my job), and for me it is about the best part of the SATA spec (since I don't have to reboot machines just to throw a different drive in for testing).
On another note, I'd guess this is also why it took so long to come out with an eSATA power spec that would work, since occasionally it matters whether you pull the SATA cable or the power cable first. Pulling power first is generally the way to go, as sometimes if you pull the SATA cable first the machine will get pissed, and you gotta reboot as your SATA controller will just sit there waiting to hear back from the drive that no longer has a connection.

Re:At least its not Power Over SATA

[MiniMike]

Maybe they could call it PATA to avoid confusion...

Re:12V unusual?

[cheater512]

Why are you talking about batteries?

5v is standard for TTL (transistor-transistor logic) digital circuits. 3.3v for more complex chips and 1.8v for low power stuff.
Good luck getting batteries to produce any of those voltages.
You will find all three of them plus 12v in your computer however.

Connect Everything Over Ethernet

[dogganos]

Why SATA and eSATA and IDE and USB, FireWire and DVI and and and??...
If everything just used a simple, yet as it has been proven efficient protocol like Ethernet, then our lives would be much easier.
Oh, and Ethernet also has Power Over Ethernet for the hungry devices. I wait for the day when I will plug an RJ-45 jack into my hard drive (which will not be a hard-drive, but an SSD).

My $0.02