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Hardware

ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived 344

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bigger-faster-nifty-kean dept.
Spot writes "If you're a hardware junkie, then you may already know ATA133 is on it's way to becoming the new standard for drive controllers. LittleWhiteDog has a very detailed look into the Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller and Maxtor's D740X-6L ATA133 interface drive. " And I just bought a few 100g drives :) I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.
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ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived More

ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived

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  • SCSI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kawaichan ( 527006 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:05PM (#2555383) Homepage
    Still rules for now, when will serial ATA will come out for the consumer market? seemed like a slick deal for me. As for ATA 133, it's just a holding tech until Serial ATA comes out (god knows when)

    • SCSI is dead (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by crow ( 16139 )
      SCSI is dead.

      For most consumer and single-user environments, IDE is plenty fast enough. Even in the small server market, IDE is adequate. In the high-end server market, people are moving away from SCSI in favor of Fibre Channel.

      IDE is squeezing SCSI out of the low end, while Firbre Channel is doing the same to SCSI in the high end. SCSI won't be around as a serious disk option for much longer, I suspect.

      (Not to mention that USB has killed SCSI for things like scanners.)
      • What kind of drives does fibre channel use? Hint: it isn't ide, and I haven't seen many fibre channel interface drives lately.

        ostiguy
        • That depends a lot.

          If you do "fiber channel the right way", then you have DUAL fiber ports PER drive. The disks for the Sun A5000 FC JBOD cabinet are this way.

          Seagate makes dual FC-AL attach drives. You should look at them.
      • SCSI is dead for Desktops - but for workstatios and small servers, nothing beats the 15,000 RPM SCSI offerings from IBM and Segate. If IBM or Segate offer these drives in an IDE configuration, then SCSI will be truly dead.

      • Re:SCSI is dead (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cnkeller ( 181482 ) <cnkeller@nOsPAM.gmail.com> on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:20PM (#2555489) Homepage
        SCSI is dead.

        I'm not going to argue with any of your points, but I still disagree. SCSI is still faster than IDE and most people tend to agree that SCSI components are better engineered. SCSI is a stable standard that is probbaly going to be around for a while. Linux wise, you don't have to bother messing with emulation and the possible IRQ nightmare. I don't see why there won't be a mixture of standards. IDE/ATAPI for joe consumer, SCSI for us discrimating desktop/server buyers, and FC for people who have too much money and like buzzwords.

        Has anyone actually benchmarked FC and the latest SCSI drives? I'm curious as to the differences.

        • Except drive for drive IDE and SCSI drives are the same. How can one be "faster"? Most SCSI drives are just IDE drives with a SCSI controller attached to the IDE interface. Do you mean that they appear faster since SCSI can transfer between disks at once? Or do you mean that SCSI disks actually can spin the disk faster than IDE. With one disk on each controller they'll score exactly equal.
          • That hasn't been true for a long time. The last SCSI drive that I saw with a bridge board was a 65MB Maxtor SCSI drive. SCSI drives are usually built with better/faster mechanisms than IDE drives. It isn't a technical issue, it's a different market segment.
      • You got it backwards. FC is dead because u160 lvd scsi killed it. FC switches are $$$ per port. Their speed advantage over older scsi implementations is gone. For specialized storage requirements FC is still there but scsi is the only thing going in mainstream server storage and iSCSI sill likely kill the remaining FC market.

        Anyway your 'IDE is fast enough' point is stupid. IDE is only fast enough if you like waiting around for a long time while your drive runs. High-end SCSI disks eclipse high-end IDE disks by a very large margin. The best SCSI disk is more than twice as fast as the best IDE disk. Yeah they are pretty expensive. Most IDE disks are not "fast enough". The consumer market is way past Windows productivity applications. That's the corporate market. The consumer market wants to rip CDs to MP3, cut DVDs from their digital camcorders, and manipulate large digital photographs.

      • Re:SCSI is dead (Score:2, Informative)

        by shoppa ( 464619 )
        In the high-end server market, people are moving away from SCSI in favor of Fibre Channel.

        Dude, FC is SCSI. Take a look at the SCSI-3 spec [t11.org] sometime.

    • Sure, I'll upgrade to SCSI, as soon as you point me to an affordable 75-gig SCSI drive. By affordable I of course mean "under $250," not $1000.

  • linux support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aardvaark ( 19793 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:07PM (#2555397) Homepage
    How is the linux support for ata133 interfaces??

  • darn! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by InfiX ( 160201 )
    due to the limitations of 32bit PCI, this effectively makes my ultra160 SCSI controller and hard drives obsolete as far as transfer speeds are concerned (and i assume the ata133 will be considerably cheaper than u160 devices of the same size based on past experience with IDE vs. SCSI). well, 15,000rpm is still nice though :)
    anyone have good reason now (other than slightly superior seek times) to stay with SCSI solutions?

    • Re:darn! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Drakantus ( 226374 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:18PM (#2555472)
      When was the last time you saw a 10,000RPM IDE drive? As far as an *interface*, IDE is fine and the slight advantages of SCSI don't justify the cost. However, purely due to the drive manufacturers stuborness, you can not find anything faster than 7200RPM in an IDE drive. While the fastest IDE drives are *VERY* competitive with SCSI performance, SCSI still has the top drives. Nothing touches the Seagate X15-36LP, and the "cheap" ($200) maxtor 10k III is still faster than anything available in IDE.

  • I want one! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:09PM (#2555408) Journal
    I will be able to code and type all my Word documents so much faster now.

  • I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.

    You should see what kind of drives they are just *giving* away these days...

    2 gigs? I'll never fill that up! :)

    (seriously, you'd be suprised how many people consider their old 2 gig drives to be in the same league as their old 30 meggers a few years ago! :))
    • It's not the size, it's reliability/speed. I would be fine with a 600MB drive if it was as fast as a modern drive, and reasonably reliable- but I don't expect much from 6 year old storage. For that reason I'll toss or give away pretty much any drive under 6GB these days.
  • *sigh*

    and I've had my new ATA100 60GB hard drive for a week and a half.....

  • They keep making ATA faster ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jkujawa ( 56195 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:10PM (#2555426) Homepage
    But they aren't doing anything to make it SUCK LESS. Drive platters aren't getting faster at the rate the controller is. Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.

    Now that IDE has for all intents and purposes killed SCSI on the desktop, you'd think that they'd expend a little fucking engineering effort to make it so that you can control more than two drives on a controller, and so that a other devices on the chain can work while one is processing a command.

    I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.
    • I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.

      If you ever wrote FDC drivers, you'd know that's not true. :)

    • Re:They keep making ATA faster ... (Score:4, Flamebait)

      by Sj0 ( 472011 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:22PM (#2555500) Journal
      It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.

      If that's how you feel, I pity you. While I'm doing that, I'll see how many RLL or MFM drives you have in your PC right now, and if you have none, I'm gonna smack you.

      The truth is that IDE was a godsend for anybody who wanted a hard drive in their PC. The fact that their interface came standard in any bios, the fact that you didn't have to worry about whether your new drive would work on your old controller (or your old drive on your new controller) were revolutionary, as was the incredible speed you could achieve without worrying about interleaving your drice. The price was right as well. IDE had what it took to become a dominant standard, and anybody who thinks differently is just spewing SCSI loving garbage(note:I have nothing against SCSI, but it has never had the price advantage, the compatibility advantage or the ease of installation which made IDE so popular.)

      Basically, until you have tried to troubleshoot an MFM or RLL drive, you can keep your mouth shut and quit bitching. There were plenty of standards which are far worse than IDE.
      • It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface which is currently in widespread use.

        SCSI electronics aren't any more complex than IDE electronics, and the price of SCSI would not be what it is if Worse is Better [jwz.org] hadn't stuck it's dirty fingers into the pot.
    • One other thing that definitely falls in the "please suck less" category is write caching... Lots of otherwise decent ATA drives lie about data having been written to the platters, when it is really still just in the drive's on-board cache. This inflates benchmark numbers, but it also makes it impossible for the operating system to guarantee filesystem integrity. (journaling filesystems don't work when the drive lies about what data has really made it to the disk...)

      As far as I know most SCSI drives don't deceive the OS in this way.
    • That's why they're making SerialATA [serialata.org]. Faster, hot swapable, and no more channelsx2 drive limit.

    • Re:They keep making ATA faster ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by RelliK ( 4466 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @06:06PM (#2555768)
      I couldn't agree more.

      No drive in existence can even come close to saturating ATA/66. Under some conditions they break through 33MB/s, but that's about it. ATA/100 and ATA/133 then are totally useless. But let's make a few calculations:

      ATA/133 interface can transfer data from the HD's cache to memory at 133 MB/s, while ATA/66 drive can do so at 66 MB/s. The standard cache size on modern HDs is 2MB. At 66MB/s it takes 0.03 seconds to read the entire cache. At 133MB/s, it takes 0.015 seconds. Therefore, whenever you try to read data from disk, an ATA/66 drive will operate at 66MB/s for the first 0.03 seconds! After that, the speed will be limited by the speed of the spindles. Similarly, an ATA/133 drive will operate at 133MB/s for the first 0.015 seconds. Also, an ATA/133 drive will be faster than ATA/66 drive for a whopping 0.015 seconds at a time! Wow!!! (and that's assuming that the desired data is in the cache in the first place...)

      How about improving IDE so that multiple drives can operate concurrently? That would justify the interface speed increase. How about making it hot-swappable? How about making it usable for external devices? But no, they have to keep on making ATA/100, ATA/133, ATA/999, ATA/2000, etc. so that Joe Consumer has yet another marketing gimmick to buy...
    • > I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.

      Now let's see, where I have seen this before?
      - 80x86 one of the worst ISA (braindead floating points ISA, too few registers, unduly complicated) won against all the other because it was cheaper.. IBM considered going with the 68000, but it was quite expensive..

      - Microsoft vs Apple: Windows won, they were cheaper and still able to get the job done..
      Who earns more money now?

      Do you see a trend here?

      As long as it get the job done, the cheapest technology will win, even if it is "ugly" from a technical point of view..
    • Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.
      Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.

  • IDE Question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pnatural ( 59329 )
    are commands sent over the IDE bus synchronous? i remember reading a few years ago that one of the major differences between SCSI and IDE was that SCSI controllers could take commands out of sequence. anyone know anything about this?

    • Re:IDE Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by edmudama ( 155475 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:23PM (#2555504)
      The ATA/ATAPI-6 specification has support for command queueing, which is the asynchronous component of SCSI. SCSI also implements out-of-order data transfers within a command, which is not part of the ATA spec, however this doesn't help quite as much as command reordering in the queued world.

      In the queued-ATA design, the command phase consists of writing all the same task-file registers as before. However, instead of a data transfer phase, an ATA-6 drive has the option to disconnect from the bus and report a 0x40 status instead of 0x50, indicating it is working on a queued command. At this point in time, up to 31 other commands may be issued while the drive is working on the first command.

      Once the drive has the data for any of these commands, it then enables the service request bit, at which point the host is expected to issue the service command. The drive, upon receiving a service command, puts the tag that the drive is servicing into the task file and begins data transfer for that command.

      To my knowledge, this is pretty similar to how SCSI drives implement this, the difference being that in ATA land the drive must complete the data transfer for a single command while in SCSI land, the drives can disconnect in the middle of a transfer and resume that transfer later after servicing other commands.

      Media rates on most drives are in the 50-70MB/s range, so the other poster saying that it only affects performance out of cache is mostly correct. The only difference here at Maxtor for the 133 vs 100 is basically a few timing changes in our ASIC.

  • The Cart before the Horse (Score:5, Informative)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:12PM (#2555436) Homepage Journal
    Given the current speed of IDE hard drivers - ATA 66 is overkill let alone ATA 133. Hell, ATA 33 is overkill for all but the fastest drives out there. The only benifit you will see, is that the drives onboard RAM-chip cache can be accesses quicker, and that moving from an older IDE spec will get you the new fangled sheiled cables that may help with reliability.
    • its one less bottleneck to conquer.
    • Storagereview.com may be worth a perusal - they used to agree with you - but new data in their testbed 3.0 indicates a high drive cache hit rate. Also, western dig now has a IDE "special edition" drive with 8meg cache - and a pretty good performance bump as a result (which also seems to hold up SR's new belief re: high drive cache hit rate). If > 2 meg IDE drive mem caches become commonplace, these new ATA specs may be worthwhile.

      That said, I do have my ATA 66 drive on my ata 33 controller on my bp6 cuz getting the highpoint ata66 is too much of a PITA.

      ostiguy
      • The cost/benifit ratio should be considered though: instead of rushing out an spending $60 on an ATA133 controller, one could buy another hard drive and put the pair of drives in a striped RAID array and quicken the performace of most read opereraions. I know you can coax FreeBSD (with a bit of effort) to boot from a software striped array, and if you buy a Promise IDE RAID controller ($50), you can coax Windows 2000 and Linux to boot off the striped array.
      • IIRC, internal transfer rates (platter >> cache) are in the gigabits - a bigger cache would definately be a huge performance boost. They'd stay filled longer, and the transfer rates the new ATA standards offer might actually mean something.
    • ATA 133 isn't just about the speed of the interface. It also overcomes capacity limits.

      For instance maxtors D540X 160 GB drive could not exist on ATA 100 and below as they can't address so much space.
  • So what's the deal, is ATA133 a viable alternative to SCSI in low end (1-2 CPU) servers? Does it play nice even at high loads? Will I get decent performance even when all drives are accessed all the time (RAID 0+1 on a busy NFS server)? Does it support hotswapping?

    And when is SerialATA due? Those stiff cables aren't any fun at all.

    • Re:Can I throw out SCSI? (Score:3, Informative)

      by cymen ( 8178 )
      If you want hotswap you have to get a controller that supports it. 3ware has the Escalade IDE RAID boards that support hot swap. Some people have said that 3ware is no longer going to be selling these boards but I think 3ware is merely idiotic by not including the details they used to on their product page. You can buy there controllers at a number of places including: http://www.hypermicro.com/store/index.htm

      See StorageReview.com for more information. Adaptec's IDE RAID board probably supports hotswap too but it is a bit more pricey. If 3ware continues to be idiotic Adaptec might be a better choice...

  • How bad on the CPU? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mdog ( 25508 )
    My friends "in the know" say that all this ide-spinoff stuff still suffers from the major drawback that it uses a lot more cpu than scsi, and hence the bandwidth numbers they proclaim are not achievable on a standard system...does this new ata stuff attempt to address this, or have I been trolled in the first place?
    • Trolled. If you compare drives at eg storagereview.com [storagereview.com] you'll see that both IDE and SCSI use something silly like 0.4% CPU when benchmarked. Here's an example:

      IOMeter Tests CPU Util
      IBM Ultrastar 36Z15 (U160 SCSI) 0.48%
      IBM Deskstar 60GXP (ATA-100) 0.35%

      • Check out storagereview's latest review of 20 drives. Given 10,000 i/o operations per second, all SCSI drives used ~20 percent CPU, while all IDE drives used ~40 percent CPU. The CPU was an Intel Pentium 4 2GHz.

  • Gimme (Score:3, Funny)

    by whovian ( 107062 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:17PM (#2555467)
    And I just bought a few 100g drives

    Maybe they will give consumers a bulk discount when buying by the kilo.

  • How sucketh IDE? Let me count the ways! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vortran ( 253538 ) <aol_is_satan@hotmail.com> on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:20PM (#2555485) Homepage
    Seems that IDE/EIDE drives are the choice for cheap and large. I'm certainly guilty of buying a few. However, I am wondering why fibre channel and SCSI aren't more popular for the desktop?

    For application installs and OS install/cache, a 10,000 rpm LVD Ultra160 is hardly fast enough for me. Also, I have 9 drives on this system. I can only do 4 with IDE, and if I put in a second controller, I blow another IRQ (of which there are only 10 available of 16 - sad commentary on PC architecture). Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.

    Allow me to extoll the virtues of SCSI/LVD:
    -15 drives/devices per IRQ
    -Lightning fast.. 320 mbyte/sec now
    -Doesn't slow down your CPU when moving or copying files from one drive to another
    -The above applies to burning CDs as well (a major bonus)

    Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?

    And what about fiber channel? Seems there was a story on /. a few months ago about an interface gadget that let's you chain them with CAT-5 ethernet cable. That would rock!

    Why is everyone buying IDE? Or are they? Just curious.

    Vortran out
    • I can answer two of your questions.....

      With new processors, how much are you REALLY giving up in processor useage? This was only a problem on Pentium and 486 processors.

      On the Fibre Channel front, FC is used for external disks. FC has a maximum distance of, someone correct me if I misremember, 2 kilometers, on optical fiber. The controllers are very expensive. The drives are expensive. The entire point of FC was to get over the 15 drive limit of SCSI and to get over the distance limitations of SCSI (3 meters) and Diff. SCSI (15 meters).

      I am not aware of any internal FC implementations on standard server hardware, but as a rule, its an external JBOD application.
    • Because it's cheap.

      Like someone said up above, it's because the SCSI vendors decided to stay in the Servers that the price never came down.

      Quick scan on Pricescan.com
      Cheapest large SCSI drive there
      Seagate Cheetah 73.4GB 10K Ultra160 SCA
      $635.00

      Cheapest medium SCSI drive there
      BM Ultrastar 36LP 36GB 7200 Ultra160 LVD
      $210.00

      For ATA-133
      Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 80.0GB Ultra ATA/133
      $195.00

      I know that SCSI is better. But is it worth getting the SCSI card and paying alot more? Not to me it's not. I play some games, mess around on the Internet and thats it...SCSI won't make that any faster.
    • Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?

      SCSI isn't more popular precisely because it is so damn expensive. To use your example, who exactly can afford the price of an Ultra160 controller and drive just for "application installs and OS install/cache" ?? Precious few people. Who *really* needs more than 4 drives - very few people, especially when bigger and bigger drives just get cheaper and cheaper.

      And SCSI isn't cheaper because there is the less expensive IDE always available. Even if SCSI could be made as cheaply as IDE, good marketing people will always price SCSI devices more than comparably-sized IDE devices, because the people who need SCSI's features are willing to pay a premium over IDE. At least in this regard, it is all about market segmentation and differentiation.
    • Seems that IDE/EIDE drives are the choice for cheap and large. I'm certainly guilty of buying a few. However, I am wondering why fibre channel and SCSI aren't more popular for the desktop?

      Seems that you answered your own question there. IDE/EIDE drives are the choice for cheap and large, while SCSI are not. And cheap and large is what is necessary to store gigabytes of audio and video, unless you're wealthy. Very few of us care enough about the extra speed to justify paying $500 for an 80-gig SCSI drive when you can get the same thing in an IDE flavor for $200.

  • Maxtor press release... (Score:3, Funny)

    by O2n ( 325189 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:20PM (#2555487) Homepage
    Maxtor's press release from Oct.29 is here [corporate-ir.net], and contains this piece of info:
    Ultra133 TX2 increases data transfer rates between a hard disk drive and a personal computer up to 33 percent compared with Ultra ATA/100 controllers [...]

    Duh. I suppose maxtor's 160Gb drive increases hard drive capacity with... well... up to 60% compared to 100Gb hard drives also. :)

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:20PM (#2555490)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • One note about utilization... in our performance tests here, chipset-based IDE implementations that are built into most motherboards are not as good performance as PCI add-on cards, usually due to smaller FIFO sizes on the DMA bus. Older VIA chipsets were notoriously bad at stalling the bus every 8 or 16 words transferred, while some add-in boards implement several K worth of DMA FIFO.
    • Now what I want is a drive standard that can support high speed, multiple drives (not just two) per channel, is low cost, and uses a better, more convenient, round cabling system (e.g. fiber, coax, etc.).


      Sooo, you're talking about SCSI right?

      • I believe the poster was referring to Serial ATA, which once again offers backward compatibility, and a significantly lower pin count: 8 (IIRC) vs. 80 (for ATA/66+).

        Also worth noting: the post specifically stated "low cost", and on top of that, SCSI cables typically aren't round, either. Both ATA and SCSI cables can be made this way, but the process with such a high number of wires is expensive. Not that it matters -- tests have shown the only real benefit of round cables to be that they are more flexible, thus easier to work with, and the airflow advantage they provide does not produce any noticeable improvement in system thermals.
        • This has been a asked and answered elsewhere in this thread. With the exception of the airflow issues...

          While I agree in most systems the benefit is nominal, it is crutial in smaller systems. I was teaching a PC servicing class a while back where the students would take apart the PC and reassemble it. The small case and poorly designed motherboard consipred to put the IDE cable from the CDROM directly over the CPU. Obviously, if they allowed the able to lay flat against the CPU fan, it would be a matter of minutes before the PC started burning itself up. This was a fairly recent system too (AMD K-7 500MHz). I'm sure the difference would also be noticeable in the cheaper systems as well. Many HPs are so tightly assembled that the IDE cabled turned the wrong way will indeed block the airflow completely. This is more as case for round IDE cables and not SCSI cables though. Not many people put SCSI in tightly packed systems.

          However, isn't the ease of use enough of a factor on it's own to justify the extra cost? Not to menton the extra insulation of the ables against damage, etc.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • What Ultra 133 buys us is the ability to use drives in excess of 137GB. Suddenly, 160MB drives are showing up that use this new standard.

      Wow, I can't wait until the 1 G+ ones come out so I can actually fit a day's worth of data on them :)

  • Why ATA133? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by abelsson ( 21706 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:21PM (#2555494) Homepage
    You're missing the point - The reason to move to ATA133 isn't for the extra speed - i doubt many people care about it: ATA133's main benefit is that it gets around the 28bit addressing in the previous versions that only allowed harddrives to be max 137GB. Hopefully the petabytes offered by ATA133 will last a while.

    -henrik

  • Imagine a RAID of those :)

  • Serial ATA (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gedvondur ( 40666 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:23PM (#2555506)
    You can get information on Serial ATA at serialata.org. You will find that these new ATA controllers break the 4 drive limitation, and have a very small cable, as opposed to the air-flow-blocking current ATA cables.

    Another mini-rant I have to get out of the way, is about the psychotic SCSI user blaming ATA for keeping SCSI from becoming a real force in desktop computing.

    Guess what, if the SCSI manufacturers would have brought the price down to reasonable levels, this would not have happened. Is SCSI better? In servers, heck yes. On the desktop? No, not really. Even on small servers, the advantages do not outweigh the extra cost of SCSI. The folks in the SCSI industry made a concious decision to stay in the server. Price DOES matter on desktops, and there is NO technology that can beat ATA for price/performance. Thats what ATA is for. Bleating that its' "technically inferior to SCSI" is stupid. They are not intened to do the same things. SCSI=Server Fibre Channel=Server ATA/Serial ATA=Desktop
    • As for air-flow-blocking, normal ATA cables can easily be made into round ones. You can purchase these at most local computer stores (not Best Buy-type places, but Fry's has them). You can also make them yourself by cutting the ribbon wire lengthwise in between the 80 conductors (making sure to cut between, not through, each conductor), then twisting the thing so it's rope-like instead of ribbon-like, and wrapping electrical tape around it.

  • Just like computers (Score:3)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:24PM (#2555518)
    I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G.

    This is very similar to the old maxim that the computer you really want is always $5000. Only now, for that money you get a 21" flat panel display, multiple GIGAhertz and more RAM than you can shake a stick at.

  • Promise SX6000 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:25PM (#2555527) Homepage Journal
    Supposed to ship today, THAT'S the baby, raid-5 with 48bits LBA support. That means 960GB (6x160Gig using maxtor 160GB drives) of storage for dirt cheap, plus Raid-5 support.

    I am planning a non-critical datacenter (rendered frames and so on) with that setup, it's crazy, while a single drive is not offering the performance of the barracuda 180GB 7200rpm drive from seagate, it's like C$500 for a 160GB drive whereas the seagate would cost me around C$2500, you can get to the same performance (plus increased storage and safety with Raid 1 or 5) for the same price than a single seagate drive. it ROCKS.

    I can't beleive I payed C$300 for a 40MB on my amiga1200 not even 10 years ago :)
    • I just got a SX6000 and I am testing it a bit because I want to put some drives on it and make a RAID 5 disk. I've known people having problems with Promise controllers dropping disks in the RAID, so I have installed 2 Western Digital 80GB and striped them. That way I figure if it's not stable, I am sure to know about it. :)
      When I am done testing it, I'd really like to install FreeBSD on it, but sadly there's not yet any drivers for it. Read on Google [google.com] that Mark Smith is willing to do a driver for it if he gets the hardware and if I could, I'd be more that happy to send a sample. :-)
      Anyway the driver status was that W2K was easy to install with the driver disk, but once that was tried, I installed RedHat 7.1 because there was drivers for it. and it seemed to work, execpt for for the extensive many hours it took for the drivers check that the RAID was clean with no partitions.
      I then discovered that if I choose "other" as operating system in the bios, RedHat 7.2 install could see it as a i2o controller. Mandrake installed failed for me. But I am also a "new" Linux user since FreeBSD has been my preferred choice but since it does not support it, I install Linux instead.
      So before you go ahead, make sure that there's drivers for your os. :-)
      The SX6000 is a nice "low end" RAID, but it lacks the features of the "real" ones such as adding another disk to a existing RAID. I was not able to do that from the BIOS or the Windooze Utility(which is not available from Linux, and I don't think that it works from Wine :-) )

      Hope you could use my input.
      Uhm next weekend I'll get a few more disks and try a RAID 5 setup. And I really like to see how it reacts on different size disks when the time comes where one drive fails and you can't the just that model that anymore. But still if it won't drop the drives on me, I think it a great controller considered the price..

      CU

  • PCI Standards (Score:3, Insightful)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmartNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:28PM (#2555541) Homepage Journal
    From the article: "The TX2 is the first Ultra ATA133 controller card that has support for 66MHz PCI motherboards (32-bit @ 66MHz as opposed to the current 32-bit @ 33MHz - not the same as 64-bit @ 33MHz). Granted there are no 32-bit 66MHz PCI motherboards available at this point in time (they'll be here "when they're done") but when they are available this card will be able to take advantage of the extra hertz."

    It seems that we have two competing PCI slot standards - 64-bit/33MHz and 32-bit/66MHz. I assume that eventually we will see 64-bit/66MHz.

    I remember an article from a few years ago talking about what the next step in PCI slots would be, and it spoke to these two steps. The argument against 64-bit slots was that it would have to change the physical dimensions of the slot to accomodate the additional bits being passed. The problem with 66MHz slots was cross-talk and RF interference between two adjacent slots.

    Since these new ATA/133 cards are backwards compatible with 33MHz slots, I must assume they found a way to reduce RF interference. The existence of 64-bit PCI slots means that industry has found a way to move 64-bits using the older physical architecture.

    That said, which of the standards do Slashdot readers think will catch on? Or will the two compete until a 64-bit/66Mhz standard is agreed upon?
    • There is already a 66mhz 64 bit bus. Many servers have it already.

      This 64bit technology will probably never come to the PC. Its too expensive and is limited by price to servers. Even 33mhz 64bit will not happen on consumer class PCs. PCI-X falls into the same category.

      What you will see, is a generational leap to NGIO or Hypertransport or some other bus technology. Intel is not planning on putting PCI-X or 66/64 on consumer PCs, and those boys really set the standards there.
      • When you say "server", are you limited to Xeon chips? Is there no AGP port? Can PCI video make up for that? Are there any 32/66 or 64/66 PCI video cards? What is keeping me from saying "damn the torpordoes, full gear ahead!"?

        --Blair
        • No, not really. Pentium II, III, and IV servers.

          For x86 based graphical workstations, such as multiprocessor Dell machines, there is AGP slots. There are, however, generally not AGP in full-blown file servers. Usually they come with a small, cheap embedded ATI or some other video chip. There is no need for graphical power on a server.

          As far as video cards in the 66/64 or 33/64 format, I do not know of any.....but in the big, wide world, there might be some, but I think that if there is, they are few and far between.

    • Re:PCI Standards (Score:3, Informative)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      64 bit PCI slots have been around for while, and are common in servers. Theyre around twice as long as a 32 bit PCI (duh), and older 32 bit PCI cards work fine in them.

    • Uhhm, AMD 760MP boards (Tyan Thunder/Tiger) come with 33MHz 64bit PCI slots. They are backwards compatible with 33MHz 32bit PCI slots. The 760MPX chipset (due out soon) will support 66MHz 64bit PCI slots. Then there are ServerWorks chipsets that support 66MHz 64bit PCI already. They (as the name suggests) are often used in servers.
    • Since these new ATA/133 cards are backwards compatible with 33MHz slots, I must assume they found a way to reduce RF interference. The existence of 64-bit PCI slots means that industry has found a way to move 64-bits using the older physical architecture.


      It's possible the architecture was changed, though I can't verify this either way. If you've noticed the new AGP slots, they're physically wider than the original ones, but are backwards-compatible with the original cards - they come with the "extra" part covered with a plastic guider so the old cards will fit snugly, which you can remove to insert the newer, wider cards.

  • It seems to be consipciously absent from most motherboards and hard drive. It sounds great in practice (a dedicated channel for each device, faster transfers, smaller footprint) but Intel has explicitly declared that their chipsets will not support it. I guess it would require a brand new chipset, but still, it would be a benefit for everyone.

    I just can't see the rationale for using ATA-133 in anything. ATA as a server interface is generally a bad thing unless done VERY carefully. SCSI has transfer rates that are up there (I think differential SCSI has a 160MB/sec transfer rate, and the drives are like twice as fast seeking as ATA drives.) and the drives are generally more reliable, or failing that, eaiser to replace. The average home user has no need for anything above ATA-66 or maybe ATA-100.
  • Last I heard IBM/Seagate/WD wern't going to support 133 ata...

    I don't think anything has changed...

  • Does Maxtor have ATA133 patented? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zsazsa ( 141679 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:56PM (#2555719) Homepage
    Looking at the specs on the linked article:

    New Ultra ATA interface with Maxtor-patented Ultra ATA/133 protocol supporting burst data transfer rates of 133MB/s.

    Maxtor-patented? I hope this is a typo or editing mistake. Looking around at http://www.uspto.gov/ doesn't reveal much, but Googling [google.com] for information brings up a few press releases saying things such as "Ultra ATA/133 Is Based on Maxtor Patented ATA Technology" and "The Fast Drives specification and licensing rights for Ultra ATA/133 are available from Maxtor under non-disclosure."

    Are other ATA standards patented like this, by Maxtor or other companies like Western Digital or Seagate?

    Ian

  • Same amount of pr0n (Score:3, Funny)

    by Per Wigren ( 5315 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @05:57PM (#2555724) Homepage
    Todays huge harddisks don't make me store more pr0n on them. They let me store the same amount of pr0n but in much better quality! :)

  • Sure they can (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeadMeat (TM) ( 233768 ) on Monday November 12, 2001 @06:02PM (#2555752) Homepage
    Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.

    Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.

  • Drive performance in Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Monday November 12, 2001 @06:09PM (#2555780) Homepage
    Since I just got a IDE burner, I finally realized that by default Linux does not take full advantage of the hardware. Here's what I did to fix that, and can now actually use my computer while dumping large amounts of data from the hard drive:

    first, boot the linux kernel with the IDE-Bus set to 66 (set the idebus=66 option), if your motherboard and drive controller supports it.

    ATA/66, Non-CD, has DMA support:
    /sbin/hdparm -d1 -X66 -c1 -u1 /dev/hda

    Older drives, not ATA/66, but with DMA support:
    /sbin/hdparm -d1 -X34 -c1 -u1 /dev/hda

    The burner doesn't support DMA:
    /sbin/hdparm -d0 -c1 -u1 /dev/hdc

    man hdparm for more info.

  • Don't waste your money on this level of technology. I'm waiting for the Serial ATA to come out next year!

  • One reason, which others have hit on, is that it's nothing more than an ego-match with SCSI's 160 MB/sec bus speed. However, there is a semi-valid reason: The spec includes a addressing extension which increases the maximum size of a drive into the petabyte range.

    steve
    • 800,000 hours mean time between failure (MTBF) in the field
    • 3 Year Limited Warranty
    units 800000hours years
    * 91.263642

    If their drives have a 91 year mean time to faulure, it would be pretty cheap for them to give a 5 year warranty rather than a 3 year warranty. Even if their MTBF was off by an order of magnitude , a 5 year warranty wouldn't be that bad.

    I think it's time for someone to compile some failure stats on these things.

    (anecdote)

    Back in the early '80s when oil sands development was starting in Northern Alberta, a friend of mine was working at the site. It was mid-winter, and starting to get pretty cold... -35C (~-30F)

    -30 is cold on any scale, but the equipment that they were using was rated doen wo -40. Now in the States, +40C ~ -40C is often referred to as "Mil Spec". In Northern Alberta it's referred to as "outdoor equipment".

    -35C, and this equipment freezes. My friend Dan calls the manufacturer of this stuff and he complains about it. The engineer led off with one question that told Dan all he needed to know.

    With a Texan drawl he asked, incredulously: "You mean it actually gets that cold?"

    I'm wondering if Maxtor's 800K Hour MTBF is kinda like that Texan Mil Spec rating.

  • I recently purchased that Maxtor drive, thinking I was getting an ATA/100 drive, and was pleasantly surprised to find out I'd have a drive that my controller may someday catch up with... :)

    But the really great thing about this drive, is that its the single quietest drive I have seen.
    Its phenominal!!!

    For those of you that care about a quiet PC, I hightly recommend this drive.

  • woo (Score:2)

    by nomadic ( 141991 )

    How come the stores haven't put up the usual signs saying "Le Controlleures ATA-133 c'est arrive"?

    Or was that joke a little too obscure for this crowd? And I don't speak French, so no bashing that...

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