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Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards 371

Posted by CmdrTaco from the faster-is-better-when-you-don't-crash dept.
bjschrock writes "Tech-Junkie reports that Asus is rolling out new motherboards with the new Serial ATA interface, along with AGP 8X support. Serial ATA will soon become pretty popular with the release of new hardware like the Seagate Baracudda ATA V hard drive, that sports a 8MB cache. The main advantage of Serial ATA, besides a slight speed increase, is the much smaller cable and the ability to hot-swap."
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Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards More

Serial ATA and AGP 8X motherboards

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  • "hot-swap" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You've got that right about "hot-swap". Those hard drives become pretty hot in there.

  • changes in SCSI land ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vluther ( 5638 ) <vid@OOOluther.io minus threevowels> on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:13PM (#3814849) Homepage Journal
    With all the improvements happening in IDE world, along with USB 2, Firewire etc.. whats happening with SCSI ?
    I'm probably not aware of anything past SCSI 3, since I can't afford it.. but what kind of improvements are in the pipeline ?.

    • Re:changes in SCSI land ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1) It already has a "slight speed increase" over current ATA in the form of U320
      2) It is already hot swappable.

      So, what changes are you expecting?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I don't know if I necessarily agree, but there is some merit to the argument. SCSI's big advantages to date are the large number of drives per channel and the high data rates; The fastest SCSI has always been the fastest thing going.

          Those expensive SCSI drives really are better; they're made much better, they're intended to be reliable. But with RAID, which is the primary use for SCSI disks anyway, you don't NEED them to be ultra-reliable; you're better off if they're cheap - hence the I in RAID. So there is a good chance you're right. With a truly hotswap version of IDE coming up, with a faster transfer rate, SCSI may go the way of the dinosaurs. However... it's going to be a while.

          Personally, I won't miss it, as long as serial IDE's hotswap is good.

        • Most users would see more of a performance increase by purchasing an 80GB IDE drive and buying ooh-gobs of RAM with the savings.

          That comment makes me wonder why drives and/or controllers don't come with one or two SIMM/DIMM slots? Can you imagine the speed increase you'd get if you could add 256MB of memory to a drive's cache for $60 or so?

    • SCSI has a lot of things going over ATA. ATA133 can only handle one device, if you use more it bumps down to ATA66. SCSI on the other hand can handle 7 devices, and as such makes an excellent high-speed RAID platform. SCSI isn't going away any time soon, as no self-respecting video/photo/audio professional would use a rig with an ATA setup.
      • I hate to snipe you from your high horse, but ata133 or even ata100 with a decent 7200 rpm drive will meet or beat any scsi less than scsi160. Mainly because most SCSI160UW drives are 10k rpm drives with big caches. At any rate, the bang for the buck award goes to IDE.

        Let me put it this way. You're in the market for a fairly quick machine. You have 2k to spend. Do you put money into your video card, quality motherboard, ram and affordable, big, quick ata drives or do you skimp on EVERYTHING and get a crazy expensive scsi controller and an ungodly priced scsi 160uw 10k rpm drive? I think that one answers itself.

        In a world where price is no object, everyone would use scsi. Unfortunately nobody lives in that world.

        BTW your quip about self-respecting whoever using a rig with ATA? Guess what, once Apple was satisfied with A/V capable ATA drives they found the holy grail for bringing their price down. I've seen/used lots of A/V rigs with ATA drives. Apple had no choice but to use ATA to bring their prices down. No matter how you look at it, SCSI is and always will be overpriced.
    • This [macspeedzone.com] mac-centrenic page has a comparison between SCSI and Firewire. My guess is that Ultra SCSI-3 is currently king. It would be interesting to plot DMA and ATA on such a graph also -- maybe someone can plot that up for us.
    • There are several new things happening in the SCSI world. U320 is the latest available option in the parallel SCSI world, providing a theoretical 320MB/s on the SCSI bus. Adapters and drives are starting to become available now. Recently, T10, the SCSI standards organization, has accepted the Serial Attached SCSI [serialattachedscsi.com] protocol into its fold. Like SATA, it is a serial interface to disks. It offers several advantages over SATA, including:
      • Support for the SCSI protocol
      • Support for tagged queueing, allowing the drive to multitask. The standard ATA and SATA protocols do not support this yet.
      • A single port can connect to multiple drives through an expander (similar to a switch). Currently, SATA is a strict point to point connection.
      • Multiple adapters can talk to the same drives.
      • Backward compatible support for SATA drives using a tunneled protocol that even allows multiple adapters to talk to the same SATA drive.
      • Initial speeds of 1.5 Gb/s and 3Gb/s per port, compared to SATA's 1.5Gb/s per port
      Expect Serial Attached SCSI to be targeted at the server market. SATA will be targeted more at the desktop and low end servers where performance and reliability aren't as critical, but cost is.

  • Wrong link (Score:5, Informative)

    by tandr ( 108948 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:13PM (#3814854)
    the right place is to point to ST3120023AS [seagate.com] and not ST3120023A

  • Why don't we see 10K drives? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:13PM (#3814855)
    I can see no reason for 10,000RPM and 15,000RPM drives to be SCSI-only anymore. consumer technologies like ATA133 or SerialATA are giving consumer drives bandwidth that they can't hope to consume. Do these 10K and 15K RPM drives really need a SCSI connection? What's the point of pushing faster and faster consumer bus connections if manufacturers are unwilling to take advantage of them with faster drives.

    Regards, Guspaz.

    • Re:Why don't we see 10K drives? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:20PM (#3814921)
      Probably due to heat issues. High RPM SCSI Drives go into server class machines with lots of fans and (usually) climate controlled raised floor locations. They are also noisy.

      I'd imagine most consumers don't have adequate cooling for those drives and it would be expensive to keep warranty replacing them. Not to mention, cheaper IDE drives would steal away sales from (I suspect) more profitable SCSI equipment.

    • But even going from ATA100 to ATA133 with a 7,200RPM drive, there's a speed increase (granted not very large).

      But if there are speed increases from just upping the bus, then perhaps increasing the RPM isn't necessary as much yet.

      I do agree though, we need faster spinning drives now if we really want better speed... or maybe just huge ram drives
      • The only speed increase you see going from ATA66 to ATA100 to ATA133 is burst transfers from the cache. Go read the specs on the drives - not a single one has a disk to buffer transfer rate that exceeds ~50 MB/s (ATA33 maxes at 33 MB/s, 66 at 66 MB/s - get the picture yet?).

        If the disk happens to have the data you request in its cache (most drives have either 2 MB or 8 MB of cache now) then yes, you'll max out the bus. For as much as 80 milliseconds (8 MB cache on an ATA100 bus). Wow. And then you're back to slogging the data off disk - which varies from ~20 MB/s (inner tracks) to ~50 MB/s (outer tracks).

        You can improve this transfer rate in a couple ways - either go for higher spindle speeds or go for higher data density. SCSI drives do the former. Density keeps going up, but it hasn't jumped radically for a few years now, and there's nothing in the pipe that's going to make it jump again.

        Go to large RAM drives of some sort? Sure... but you'll be paying roughly 300x as much for the same storage space. On the upside, FlashRAM is more than 300x faster. On the downside it's not available in anywhere close to the capacities you'd want.

    • Re:Why don't we see 10K drives? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Cost. It costs more to make 10,000 rpm drives, and they don't feel the consumer market will support it enough to make it worthwhile. When Joe Average goes computer part shopping (assuming he does), he doesn't care about the drive speed too much. Instead, he just wants the most gb for the buck. When it comes down to it, 7200 rpm or even 5400 rpm is fast enough for most home users anyway. If they're doing something that needs more rpms, they should probably be using SCSI.

    • Re:Why don't we see 10K drives? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ryan Amos ( 16972 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:50PM (#3815154)
      The main reason is because 10k drives aren't terribly durable. They need a fan assembly pointing at them or they get too hot and won't last a year. Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array. People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.

      Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one. SCSI supports concurrent reads and writes, where ATA swaps them off. In reality you'll never see the 133 mbps in an ATA133 setup; where you'll come a lot closer with LVD160 SCSI. Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)
      • You were right on the money untill you brought up the old CPU utilization argument. With UDMA the CPU utilization of modern IDE controllers on todays GHz processors is trivial.
      • Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one.

        That turns out not to be the case. Even with 7200 disks, ATA 100 is able to handle 2 drives in parallel for RAID, on the same cable. Going to 10000 rpm and an ATA133 and it will still handle 2 very well. See: tomshardware [tomshardware.com]

        Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats

        Moores law eats this issue for breakfast I think- harddrives are increasing in speed much more slowly than processors are. I mean, sure a SCSI interface saves processor but not that much.

      • People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.

        What is it with people complaining about their computers making noise anyway? I actually like my computers to sound like they're on...the lack of noise makes me nervous (see: Dead Silence, aka Power Outage). I have a computer by my bedside and the noise helps me sleep...in fact, I have a very hard time sleeping without that white noise.

        Computers make noise, just like refrigerators make noise, washing machines make noise, and cars make noise. It's not like it's constant beeping, either, folks. Get ovah it.
    • I personally hope I never have a 10,000 rpm drive. Rotational speed isn't the only factor, a higher rotational speed gets you more power usage, more heat and more noise. At these speeds you have to consider what stress on the media does to the recording surface, as well. A greater data density, on the other hand, can improve transfer rates while giving you a lower RPM, along with the lower power and noise that go with it. New head technology is promising us much greater data density (remember the recent /. article on terabyte drives?) I would much rather see the manufacturers focus on an approach that continues to improve data density than working on increasing rotational speed.

  • Hot-swap? Drives are hot enough already :( (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But honestly, it's great to see hard drive manufacturers dealing with issues that need to be solved, such as drive throughput. IMO, the speed of drives and heat are now much bigger problems than space is, at least for the average desktop consumer.

    I've got over 100gb of space, and I'm using 35gb tops. *chuckle* I've yet to meet anyone with more than 20gb of mp3s, and most people I've met who rape the MPAA with pirated movies tend to burn them to discs and not keep them on their hard drives.

    We've got too much living space! Give us quieter, faster, cooler drives! :)
    • I actually know someone with 85gigs of MP3s
      He does do DJ'ing though.
    • I already have a quarter of a terabyte of HD storage, and it's full--games, images, and videos. The MP3's I've already had to move to CDs in order to clear up space, and many other things are in cold storage on CDs awaiting my next HD upgrade--I've got 4 50-CD spindles of full Taiyo Yuden CD media lying around, waiting for more HD's so that they can be easily accessible again.

      But that's just me. :-)
    • "I've got over 100gb of space, and I'm using 35gb tops. *chuckle* I've yet to meet anyone with more than 20gb of mp3s, and most people I've met who rape the MPAA with pirated movies tend to burn them to discs and not keep them on their hard drives."

      You're not the same person who once said that 640k was all you needed in a computer are you ?
  • Serial ATA will soon become pretty popular with the release of new hardware like the Seagate Baracudda ATA V hard drive, that sports a 8MB cache.

    The article and the link to the Segate drive both seem to contradict the post. The Barracuda ATA V is not a serial ATA drive with atn 8MB cache, but rather and ATA/100 drive with 2MB of cache. The Barracuda design will be the basis for Segate's future serial ATA drives.

  • Some info on Serial ATA... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mongoks ( 540017 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:16PM (#3814880)
    Maxtor [maxtor.com]
    serialata.org [serialata.org]

  • Serial Drives? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Snowgen ( 586732 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:16PM (#3814888) Homepage
    Wow--A serial drive! is it true the the project's code name was Commdore 1541? :)
    • project's code name was Commdore 1541?

      Yep. Bet you can't guess what the code name for the next revision is: "Enhancer 2000".
    • I bet you're all wishing you had an authentic IBM computer now! With serial drives, you'd finally be able to use that cassette basic in your bios!

  • Drive not available until August! (Score:5, Informative)

    by kirkb ( 158552 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:23PM (#3814951) Homepage
    25 June 2002
    PC World

    Seagate is demonstrating its first Serial ATA hard drive at PC Expo/TechXNY with the help of a prototype Intel motherboard, and promises to be among the first hard drive makers to deliver the new technology, in products this fall.

    The technology demonstration comes just one day after Seagate announced another first: 60GB-per-platter hard drive technology. Barracuda ATA V 7200-rpm drives using the new 60GB platters will arrive in retail outlets by August, say company executives.

  • Finally... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kerne ( 42289 )
    a board with serial ATA....guess it's time to replace the 'ole AMD 450.

    Here's some close-ups:
    http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/asus/p4s8x/p4s8xga llery2.htm [ocworkbench.com]

  • Advantages? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 )
    The main advantage of Serial ATA, besides a slight speed increase, is the much smaller cable and the ability to hot-swap."

    Smaller cable? Pshaw... Sound like Martha Stewart of the Mobo set. Big cables, Baby!

    I'm still of the mindset that parallel is better than serial, particularly where high bandwidth is concerned. Probably the _real_ advantage is that they'll be making the mobos for instead of $$$.

    Hotswap, now that's a definite advantage, assuming your version of Windows doesn't decide you've suddenly changed the system too much and shuts down until you get Microsoft on the phone and they grant you a new code to allow you to keep running. (A friend replaced the CPU on his mobo and Windows stopped working, until he called Redmond and they gave him a 40-some letter code to continue, very nice of them, I can't imagine how we've done w/o that advantage all these years, but that was another story...)

    • Re:Advantages? (Score:3, Informative)

      by soboroff ( 91667 )

      I'm still of the mindset that parallel is better than serial, particularly where high bandwidth is concerned.
      FYI, current IDE chaining is actually worse than serial. Masters and slaves fight over the bus, and certain drives can't even work together at all. Anyone who uses IDE and is trying for high performance leaves one drive per channel currently.

      • Re:Advantages? (Score:3, Funny)

        by T3kno ( 51315 )
        Amen to that, dont ever try to run a hard drive and a CD-RW on the same channel. On a side note, does ATA or this serial ATA offload any of the processing to a special controller, ala SCSI, or is it still handled by the CPU?
    • Smaller cable? Pshaw... Sound like Martha Stewart of the Mobo set. Big cables, Baby

      Bigger cables inhibit airflow. And while, yes, there are "round" IDE cables out there, they aren't as flexible as flat cables and are more prone to breaking at the connectors. All of these issues are solved by a serial standard.

      I'm still of the mindset that parallel is better than serial, particularly where high bandwidth is concerned

      Which is why all the high speed busses have moved to serial interfaces, right?

      Yes, parallel means that you can toss more stuff over the wall at once. The problem is, you can't do that very fast or you start running into serious timing and EMI issues. High speed serial doesn't have as many timing issues, and while you do generate EMI with serial still (duh), at least you don't have to worry about causing interference on the next wire over -- you know, the one that's supposed to be handing the other side of the interface the next bit? If you have to shield every wire in a parallel cable from every other wire then you'd definitely get your big cables. As in 3-4 inches in diameter with a bend radius slightly larger than you are tall.
    • Smaller cables aren't just decorative. Those huge ribbon cables that connect your floppies, CDROMs, and hard drives restrict airflow immensely, raising the temperature inside your case by probably as much as 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit. High case temperatures, in turn, slowly kill all that fancy silicon you've got in there, and also take years off the life of your shiny new hard drive. It doesn't surprise me that the newest, fanciest hard drives are moving to smaller cables. Aside from the processor, they are probably the biggest producers of heat. So if you want high RPMs, you've gotta do something to cut down on heat.
  • I don't quite understand how is by nature faster in anyway than parallel. Fundamentally it is the other way around. 2x the parallel wired, 2x the data transfer rate, plus all the handshaking is much easier

  • What about CPU utilization? (Score:3, Informative)

    by fahrvergnugen ( 228539 ) <fahrvNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:46PM (#3815116) Homepage
    Some of us still use SCSI just because of the extremely low CPU overhead it requires. The offboard controller can take care of burning a disc for me in the background while I play a quake 3 engine game, without any fear of buffer underruns. I'd like to look into cheaper hardware and Serial ATA certainly fulfills the speed & hotswap needs I have, but what about keeping overhead low? Anybody have any figures on this?

    • Re:What about CPU utilization? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:19PM (#3815464) Homepage
      Some of us still use SCSI just because of the extremely low CPU overhead it requires

      Uh... and what speed CPU are you running? A 200 MHz Pentium2?

      Modern computers have so much extra horsepower nowadays it's absurd. Even maxed out an ATA133 drive won't consume more than 2-3% of a CPU nowadays.

      burning a disc for me in the background while I play a quake 3 engine game, without any fear of buffer underruns

      Any decent computer built in the past 2 years can handle that too. IDE drives don't make platters like they used to -- they've got large buffers and use techniques to ensure no buffer underruns. Yeah, they use more CPU than SCSI does. See above.

      I used to be a big SCSI advocate... and I finally replaced the old SCSI-2 drives I had in one of my PCs with IDE drives. I increased the storage, decreased the noise, and improved performance of the system. The cost to replace the old drives with newer SCSI equivalents would've been absurd - nearly $1000 since it meant a new controller too. Instead I spent $60 on a CD-RW (12x/32x/48x - the cheapest SCSI CD-RW was 10/12/20 for 3x the cost), used an older IDE drive I had spare, and seriously boosted my system.

      Does IDE/ATA have issues? Sure. The whole lack of command reordering, one device on the bus at a time, etc. -- but none of these are ever going to impact a home user. It's becoming questionable if they significantly impact low-end servers too. If you're putting together a database or a big ass file server, yes, go SCSI/RAID and get the best you can afford. Otherwise start understanding that modern IDE is really not the same as the old, crappy IDE that evolved out of MFM/RLL.
    • So why would I want to pay extra for the SCSI one to do the same thing?

      In case you haven't been keeping up with IDE lately, you could rewrite that sentence with "IDE" instead of "SCSI" and it'd still be accurate. Modern IDE controllers (with UDMA) will not use more than 1-3% of the CPU (which is close enough to "extremely low CPU overhead" for me). And any modern IDE CD burner will have BurnProof, which will mean that even in the unlikely event of a buffer underrun, you won't burn a coaster -- the drive can just pause burning, and restart when the buffer is filled again.

  • Why not smaller capacity drives? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by st0rmshad0w ( 412661 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @12:51PM (#3815167)
    Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?

    There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days. And we cant get smaller drives.
    So they just wind up only getting a 6 gig partition. Lotta waste.

    • Probably the same reason SUV's are popular these days. Its not what people _need_, its what they _think_ they need.

      (Above and beyond the obvious "bigger, faster" ideology that seems to be ever so popular with consumers these days.)
    • You know that is a good point. Its hard to find new small drives theses days. There are good reasons to wanting smaller drives too... like less time to defrag/fdisk/fsck. I wonder if we could put in a petition to companies like seagate and tell them to make at least one small drive.

      Perhaps its not cost efficient with newer technology?

    • Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs?

      Probably because it costs no less to manufacture than large, fast hard drives.

      There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days.

      Shouldn't your userID be BOFH? I have 10+ gigs of MP3s from my CD collection on my hard drive.

      So they just wind up only getting a 6 gig partition.

      You do this intentionally? I'm sure your userID needs changing.

      Lotta waste.

      Of what? It's the same amount of matter.
    • Because once you have the ability to make high capacity drives, the lower capacity drives aren't any cheaper to make.
    • The same reason why they don't make 100MHz CPU's any more. Hard drive companies, like any other company, want to maximize their prices and won't be able to do that by selling smaller drives than their competition. Besides, don't most hard drives have one platter these days? Then, there wouldn't be any cost savings to go to a smaller disk size.
    • Because it's not cost effective to produce them. If you have a facility that can produce 30 GB platters, why should you downgrade it to one fifth of that capacity? There's a limited amount of fab space to all companies. If they dedicate it to a lower density platter then they will not be able to manufacture as many high density platters as they need. And when a 40G disk is ~$50 now, how much waste are you talking about here really? The marginal cost (or profit) is negligible.

      Make the disk smaller? Sure. But you realize that the standards mean it's going to be 3 1/2" wide anyway, and that a smaller diameter platter means a slower drive, right?

    • Answer: The actual cost to make a small 6 gig drive is hardly lower than the cost of a 30 gig drive. The majority of the expense of making the hard drive tends to be in mataining your facility rather than in the drive itself.
    • Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs? There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days. And we cant get smaller drives.

      Because it's cheaper for Seagate (or whoever) to kick out 50,000 40GB drives than it is to make 50,000 drives spread out over 10 different product lines. It's the same reason that a P3 600 is technically identical to a P3 800. (I speak from personal experience.)

      Economies of scale.

  • Yet ANOTHER standard. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @01:01PM (#3815276)
    Can someone explain to me the advantages of Serial/ATA over FireWire?

    FireWire currently does all these things that Serial/ATA is promising, and there's even speed increases in the works. It would be really nice if PC motherboards started shipping with internal and external firewire ports as standard, and it would mean we'd start seeing native firewire external HDDs a lot sooner.

    Do we really need ANOTHER standard ?
    • IEEE1394 (Firewire) is designed for external peripheral use, not for internal fixed drives. Although Firewire works well for external hard drives, it's designed with a different purpose in mind. As well, you can't boot off of an IEEE1934 drive, except on Macs.
      • Isn't this a problem that can be fixed simply in the BIOS? Modern BIOS's can be set up to boot from ID HD, SCSI HD, floppy, network adaptor, even USB mass storage devices. Why would it be difficult for a BIOS maker to allow someone to boot over Firewire? In fact, Firewire is more or less just the SCSI protocol over a serial interface.
    • The move from the current standard to serial ATA is as much to allow for backwards compatibility as increased speed & features. There are plans for adaptors for current drives for use with serial ATA controllers. FireWire interfaces would require all new drive hardware in addition to the motherboard. Simple truth is, forklift upgrading scares folks. They -much- prefer to upgrade piecemeal.

  • 8MB cache is at WDC (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bana_Asawa ( 590014 )
    http://www.wdc.com or http://www.wdc.com/products/products.asp?DriveID=2 7
  • I wonder why everyone overlooks the fact that Serial ATA will remove the physical cable length restrioction of the traditional ATA interfaces.

    IMHO its one of SCSI's major selling points that cables of LVD-SCSI can be > 5 m without problem.

    On the Serial ATA website they claimed that they lifted that restriction, but now, how long can they be ?

    (and for cable length, thy building a big tower, with a HD near the top. standard IDE cables don't cut it.)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Interface change-over and creeping DRM 'features' (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2002 @02:45PM (#3816263)
    Any time an interface-changeover occurs, it's important to look at what else is on the horizon at the same time. Will the first 5% of drives with this new interface be the only ones without build in Digital 'Rights Management' (DRM) features?

    I see this as a great opportunity for the DRM advocates to obsolete all older drives ("sorry, your old drive won't plug into the new motherboards") and force a change-over to the new drives with DRM in their firmware.

    Just a point to ponder.
    • Will the first 5% of drives with this new interface be the only ones without build in Digital 'Rights Management' (DRM) features?
      I don't think that will happen. Consumers are getting more and more savy every month. Since the whole Napster/MP3/peer-to-peer fiasco, the general public is becoming more informed about DRM and everything that it entails.

      Now don't get me wrong, there will never be a time when 100% of the population using computers is up to speed on stuff like that (at least not for the forseeable future) but to the people it matters to, the word is getting out. My father, a complete computer idiot, called me the other day and talked to me about some of the issues coming up. He's seen some of the Windows Media Player security creeping up on him and he doesn't like it. I never once mentioned it to him, but as more people get informed, they tell others about it. I do not ever expect to hear that stuff from my grandmother since she will probably never download an mp3 or movie file from the internet, but like I said... to the people it matters to the word is spreading.

      I'll use the oft-cited reference of Divx. People found out that they would basically have to rent the movie every time they chose to watch it, which pissed off just about everyone. What was the response? Noone bought the technology. I have very little fear about hardware DRM creeping up in all technology (but maybe a few devices which people will choose not to buy). The market will dictate what is successful and what is not, so if hard drives start coming out with DRM in them I can see a huge disaster waiting to happen. Entire stockpiles of these devices will sit unsold until finally the maker takes them back and re-tools them to be non-DRM.

      Hell, think back to the whole Intel processor serial number fiasco. It took Intel how long to give people an option to turn it off? Like 2 months I believe. Have faith in the population, people won't just lay over and accept stuff like that.

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