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Hardware

Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Drive Reviewed 221

Posted by CowboyNeal from the first-to-market dept.
Mike Parsons writes "Andrew and Adam over at Explosive Labs have a nice review up on the Seagate Barracuda V, one of the first production Serial ATA drives. Keep in mind, Generation 1 of Serial ATA was not meant to be a 'incredible performance jump.' Rather, its intended purpose was to make the industry transition seamless to allow time to mature the future generations of SATA. Generation 2 and 3 of SATA show more promise for those interested in performance, as white papers behind them gives you the nice fuzzy feeling for speed!"
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Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Drive Reviewed More

Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Drive Reviewed

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  • Serial? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I always thought parallel was faster

    *shrug*
    • It's not. Think USB. Parallel data transfer is more error-prone.

      • Re:Serial? (Score:4, Informative)

        by hamjudo ( 64140 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:24AM (#5101191) Homepage Journal
        Don't think USB, think gigabit ethernet if you want to think of a fast serial protocol.

        Oh wait, too early in the morning. Was the USB comment a joke?

        If you want a fast parallel protocol, think about trunking multiple gigabit ethernets. Instead of running bits in parallel, you run packets in parallel. You get more bandwidth, without having the timing issues of a bit level parallel cable.

        Running multiple serial links in parallel is also a win for fault tolerance. If one cable is sliced, the connection is still up, just slower.

        I don't expect to see multiple SATA cables to a single drive, but I wouldn't be surprised by multiple SATA cables to a RAID array.

    • Re:Serial? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jpop32 ( 596022 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:19AM (#5101176)
      I always thought parallel was faster

      Yes, provided they both run on the same clock speed. In this particular case they're not. :-)

      When you ramp up the clock speed of the parallel bus you get all sorts of problems (synchronisation issues, multiple wires affecting each other's capacitance, inductivity and such). One way of avoiding those problems was UltraATA's 80 wire IDE cable. And that came with increased price tag, and didn't ultimately solve all the problems, it just postponed them for a generation or two.

      The other way was to abandon parallel all the way and go serial. Since with serial (one pair of wires) you don't get any above mentioned problems you can ramp up the clock much higher, and thus get better thrhoughput, although you're transfering just one bit at a time.

      At first it sounds counter-intuitive, but it just goes to how much intuition is worth. :-)

      • Re:Serial? (Score:2, Informative)

        by The_K4 ( 627653 )
        You forgot the other big advantage.....nice thin wires that are easier work with in the case. I KNOW someone will mention the round ATA cables, but those don't bend so well. The S-ATA wires are more like the wires for the CD-Soundcard. They are much easier to work with. :)
    • I always thought parallel was faster
      Yes, but if it's already parallel, there's no point of building a Beowulf cluster of them.
  • Three generations mean you can buy SATA three times. The SATA controller I have is only version 1. So I'll stick my neck out and suggest that 2 and three will parallel the release of their respective drives.

  • 15-Pin Power Connector? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What's all that about then?

    Hardware monitoring maybe?

    Is there some new power standard about to be unleashed on us?

    • Re:15-Pin Power Connector? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:39AM (#5101236) Homepage
      If I remember things correctly this is to make it possible to run many different voltages (something like 3) to the drives, suitable for different sized drives.

      The spec can be downloaded here [serialata.org] (about 1 meg), if someone cares to verify my claims. It's all there.

    • Re:15-Pin Power Connector? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by uradu ( 10768 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:49AM (#5101259)
      > 15-Pin Power Connector? What's all that about then?

      That's what I thought, too, when I first saw the new connectors. It seems we're trading huge data and slim power connectors for slim data and huge power connectors. Why didn't they take this opportunity to move entirely to 5V drives, just like notebook drives, and have a single power connector? Yeah, they'd have to design entirely new drives rather than just slapping on new drive electronics, but it took long enough even as it is, so they might as well have.
  • Of course Serial ATA is going to be great when they get all the kinks out but for now, the Seagate Barracuda is barely faster than the WD SE drives with 8mb cache (which is a bit cheaper for now).

  • Performance? That's not why I want it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MartyJG ( 41978 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:12AM (#5101148) Homepage
    I'm not so much interested in the performance advantages of S-ATA, rather the fact that it finally kills off ribbon cables. It must be the most limiting factor inside any desktop PC. In my tower I have trouble making even long cables reach drives at the top of the case, so they have to be mounted halfway down. In my Shuttle XPC the cables are shorter, but even they have to be 'rounded' and routed around clips to reach the combo drive without taking up all the space inside. Other people complain about the airflow restrictions several ribbon cables cause inside a machine.

    In short, I don't care that (Gen-1) S-ATA starts at 150mb transfer instead of 'older' 133mb. I care that it makes building a PC easier, more space inside future barebones machines and PC manufacturers can use more interesting cases than the usual rectangular stuff. I'm excited about the possibilities it offers right now.

    • Re:Performance? That's not why I want it... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is something related to comments I've made a few times earlier. When it comes to customising machines, the exterior gets all the treatment, and the interior often ends up at best, a mess of glowing wires in the light of a cold cathode lamp. Some of the best custom cars I've seen have stunning hidden wiring tricks, so an engine bay looks to be just a block hanging in space, or a dashboard is nothing but 2 gauges and a steering column. It's a great effect for minimising visual distraction when creating a whole package.

      Yes, I'm looking at the aesthetic point of view, which has some big possibilities - the less space taken with airflow-restricting ribbon cables is a huge bonus I can't neglect to mention either.

    • Re:Performance? That's not why I want it... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @12:29PM (#5102270)
      It must be the most limiting factor inside any desktop PC. In my tower I have trouble making even long cables reach drives at the top of the case, so they have to be mounted halfway down.

      You really ought to look inside the case of a current PowerMac tower sometime, just to see how unobtrusive ribbon cables can be, if some though it put into the case design. They've done an amazing job of designing the thing to keep ribbon cables out of the way. Even the otherwise horrible 8100 case design of years ago had good cable routing.

      • I agree that the current Power Mac towers have great cable management. (Actually, the case goes back to the blue and white G3).

        Many of the high-end gaming PC companies like Voodoo and Alienware do a pretty good job at routing the cables, either with careful folding or bundling and wire loom. It's pretty impressive for a commodity PC case.

    • Obviously.
      If you wanted performance, you would have bought SCSI. Which would have also solved your cable length problem.
      Clearly, you want cheap.
    • I'm excited about the possibilities it offers right now.

      What...the same advantages of internal IEEE 1394? Yeah, that's been a HUGE success.
  • 1. Smaller Cables. 2. Hot Swappable :) 3. Small speed bump to 150 Thats all I can think of at the moment :/

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:14AM (#5101155)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • New power connector? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pastey ( 577467 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:15AM (#5101158)
    This is the first review I've seen of the new SATA drives that made mention of this.

    Anyone know why this was implemented? The article (now /.'ed) doesn't explain the reasoning, just that it exists. Why get rid of the old MOLEX? Since an adapter is included with the drive it doesn't seem that there are any new voltages required. What's the deal?

    Is this just another one of those PITA upgrades?

    • You can get multiple voltages from any difference in potential. (Voltage is just a term describing the difference between the charge density, or 'pressure' between two points)

      For example, if I placed two 1 KOhm resistors in series between "GND" and "-12V", at the contacts between the two resistors, the voltage compared to GND is -6V, and the voltage compared to "-12V" is actually +6V.

      However, due to resistor tolerances and Thevenin resistance, it's much more preferrable to have the power supply give a steady, regulated supply of -6V and +6V, if you need them.

    • Re:New power connector? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:52AM (#5101271) Homepage
      So that you can do hot plugging. The current MOLEX connector cannot be used for this - first, it requires far too much force to connect or disconnect. Second, there is no guarantee of ground before any other pins connect. Third, there is no standard on where the power connector will be located in the drive bay or with respect to the data connector.

      SATA fixes all of this.

      Is this just another one of those PITA upgrades?

      Frankly, I can't see how anyone would consider anything about SATA a PITA. Smaller, more flexible cable, no jumpers, no master/slave crap, and a standardized power connector. Where's the pain? (Ok, you'll pay maybe $20 more for the drive at first, but that pain will disappear shortly)

    • Re:New power connector? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ottffssent ( 18387 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:52AM (#5101272)
      > why new?

      Hot-swap. The ground connectors are longer than the power connectors. This grounds the drive's electronics before power is applied - prevents potential differences from destroying delicate parts.

      > why not old Molex?

      Friction-fit Molex power connectors suck. Just ask anyone who has used one more than 5 times.

      The new SATA power and data connectors allow the drive to be hot-swapped with a minimum of extras. The drives can be slid into protective cases or hot-swapped bare - a vast improvement over the bulky boxes required for current parallel IDE drives to achieve even warm-swapping.
    • This is the first review I've seen of the new SATA drives that made mention of this.
      You obviously haven't been reading Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com].

    • Re:New power connector? (Score:4, Funny)

      by salamander_sjv ( 619309 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @11:01AM (#5101607)
      > Why get rid of the old MOLEX? Are you crazy? I can't think of a single electronic component that inspires hatred and loathing like every encounter with the Molex connector. Enough hatred to curse the fool that invented the damn thing every time I have to unplug one. The Molex connector inflicts pain on every disconnect, and its inventor deserves to be strung up by his thumbs. Wiggle, waggle, wiggle, waggle, aaaaargh just come out you little bastard, aaaaaaargh!
    • MOLEX connectors are responsible for millions of tech hand scars across the world. *wiggle wiggle* *wiggle wiggle* *wig... THWAP!!!* -Bam your hand goes flying into a razor sharp heatsink or the sharp edge of a cheap case. Why get rid of the old MOLEX? Are you insane? Have you ever tried to take a molex out of some old drive? Those things are the devils creation and only cause pain (finger cramps/cut-up hands/Bruised knuckles) and untold amounts of frustration.
      Get rid of the molex please!!
    • I figure it will be about 3 months after the S-ATA drive hit the shops that someone will start putting both the new power connector and the old molex connector on the drives.
    • I thought the point was the new connector would contain the data+power in one. I wonder why they split it into 2 cables again....

  • Wait to buy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:15AM (#5101159) Homepage Journal
    What do people think is going to happen to the price of old ATA drives once the serial drives kick in?
    Are they gonna tumble down in price as the hard disk is usually one part of the computer that you move to the upgraded PC and so you will want to get the serial ones to ensure you can still use them later. This will make the old disks nice and cheap. (like SDRAM)
    Or will the old disks become so rare that they are more expencive than the new versions (Like old EDO SIMMs).

    • Re:Wait to buy? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 )
      My experience is that when you upgrade your system, moderately priced hd's are so much bigger than your current hd that it's hardly worth the trouble to move your old disk to the new system, except to transfer your old data to the newly acquired hd (and have around as a nice 'backup' drive).

      I don't think parallel ATA driver will get any cheaper than usual. More probable is that SATA will remain an expensive option for a while, until it is the default option on new motherboards. At some point they will stop manufacturing normal ATA drives in high volumes, and they will get expensive as SIMMS nowadays.
    • IDE drives didn't make SCSI drives any cheaper, did they? The logic board is the only thing that will change, and it will have a similar cost to regular IDE controller boards.

    • Re:Wait to buy? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by hatchet ( 528688 )
      When companies stop making ATA drives they'll get a bit cheaper. When they become rare(which will happen quite fast.. think EDO SIMM fast).. they'll be more expensive than SATA.
      SDR SDRAM is still mass produced because lots of things use it. (handheld devices, portable mp3 players, ...) And technology is basically the same as DDR's (Actually DDR is SDRAM too). Most such deviuces do not need aditional speed DDR offers.
      EDO SIMM is obsolette it isn't used much anymore.. SDRAM replaced it.
    • Look at the price of old ram, when serial ATA kicks in the demand for old IDE drives will drop, reducing volumes and increasing overheads. The price will go down for a litle bit to clear out ond drives and then climb.

  • Great and not so great features (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hcdejong ( 561314 ) <hobbes@@@xmsnet...nl> on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:17AM (#5101166)

    Yay! No more jumpers! The days of mechanical configuration are finally drawing to a close!

    But why did they include a new power connector? Specifically, a 15-pole connector not used in any current computers, with only 4 power leads going into it?

    Oh, and the 'review' reads like a press release. They claim independence, but are they really?

    • I think the 15 way connector is the *only* connector i.e. both power and signal. And it is desigend to be suitable for either cable connection, as currently, and backplane for hot-pluggable (raids, mirrors). If you are going to have one new connector, for the signals, why not make that new connector do everything.
    • "Yay! No more jumpers! The days of mechanical configuration are finally drawing to a close! "

      yes, this way it will all be configured the way your operating systems tells you it should be.

      If I do it mechanically, I know its been done, if I use software, I know that tge software says its done.

      The power connector changed so they can hot swap.

      • "Yay! No more jumpers! The days of mechanical configuration are finally drawing to a close! " yes, this way it will all be configured the way your operating systems tells you it should be. If I do it mechanically, I know its been done, if I use software, I know that tge software says its done.

        Why would you possibly want to configure things like master/slave/CS? SCSI has shown that you don't miss anything by doing without. USB has shown that you don't miss anything by doing without SCSI's manual device IDs.

        Yes, I know Windows sucks at automatically assigning IRQs and such, but that's an implementation problem, not a fundamnetal flaw of autoconfiguration. See the Macintosh: no IRQ settings, yet no problems.

  • 2 questions about hot-swap (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Libor Vanek ( 248963 ) <libor.vanek@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:25AM (#5101196) Homepage
    I couldn't find out nowhere answers to this 2 questions:

    - does ALL SATA adapters + disks supports hotswap?

    - does SATA under Linux support hotswap?

    And yes, I know www.serialata.org ;-)

  • Is anybody WORRIED about this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:33AM (#5101221) Journal
    OK, I'm not a luddite, I understand that progress is a Good Thing (TM) but am I the only one getting dizzy at the speed at which the hard disk drive industry seems to be moving?

    In the last five years, typical hard disk drive sizes have increased more than ten-fold, transfer speeds have shot up too and prices have come right down.

    The net effect of all these factors is that HDDs have now become commodities and many manufacturers - put off by both the shrinking profit margins available and the high investment costs of developing the next generation of drives - have left the business.

    There are now only four major players left, and all of them are doing whatever they can to maintain profitability. Cranking up volume only works so far - there are only so many customers out there, especially in today's economy - so manufacturers have looked to cut costs elsewhere.

    Two critical areas that seem to have taken a major hit are quality control and warranties. More and more drives (and in some cases, entire drive families) seem to be failing at every given opportunity. Meanwhile, the length for which they're covered has shrunk back from (typically) three years to the minimum one.

    Sure, at the high-end, speed will always be appreciated, but how many of us run render farms?
    The market is near-saturated (not everyone needs 200GB or even 20GB, because not everyone is a MP3/MPEG/whatever addict) and that situation isn't going to change any time soon.

    I would be much happier with an industry that still has some real competition and offers customers reliable, well-supported products in five years time than one that has breakneck-speed products from top to bottom but which break down every five minutes.

    For 99% of users, data integrity is the holy grail and everything else comes a distant second. I wish manufacturers would remember that.

    • Re:Is anybody WORRIED about this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:50AM (#5101264)
      For 99% of users, data integrity is the holy grail and everything else comes a distant second. I wish manufacturers would remember that.

      Everybody says that with their mouth, but not with their wallets. When it comes to buying disks, people lok at Gb and average access time, and by the drive with the best combination of these. A few may worry about heat and noise. But people don't actually pay for reliability.

      People who actually want reliability buy Scsi. The premium cost of Scsi drives is nothing to do with the interfaces - it is enchanced performance and reliablity. Check the warranty lives - IDE down from 3 years to 1 year, Scsi steady at 5 years. The manufacturers are trying to tell you something.

      • Everybody says that with their mouth, but not with their wallets.

        I disagree. I just bought a good ol' Seagate Barracuda IV, first and foremost because amongst other experienced home PC builders in the area, there have been lots of problems with every other make in the past year or two, but never a complaint about this drive AFAIK. It's slower than its rivals, probably cost slightly more, and isn't as big. It's also fast enough for me, big enough for me, and hopefully reliable enough to last as long as the PC it's going in. The warranty still ain't all that, which is annoying, but I've definitely put expected reliability before either price or performance.

      • Completely incorrect. The differences between, say, a SCSI Barracuda and an IDE one are exclusively the interface logic. The drive mechanisms are identical.

        'jfb
        • I got that from the UK technical manager of one of the main manufacturers. The specs read higher (buffer size, avarage access). When scsi first came out, the cost difference in the interface was about $20. Now, according to a different manufacturers technical rep, the difference is sub-$1. My company buys Scsi drives in quantity, so the tech reps speak directly to us, and I write the scsi drivers, so I think I know what I am talking about.
          • Well, naturally a 15,000rpm UltraIII and a 5400rpm EIDE are going to have different mechanisms. The point is that a 7200rpm 2mb buffer SCSI disk and a 7200rpm 2mb buffer IDE drive will be the /exact/ same drive, modulo the (bolt-on) interface logic.

            Buy SCSI for all the right reasons (superior performance at the top end, hot-pluggability, device bus density), not because the drives themselves are "better" than IDE ones. That there's a pricing differential is entirely due to the willingness of the marketplace to spend more on SCSI than IDE. It's soak, pure and simple.

            'jfb
    • I'm really worried about it. That's why all of my machines now have at least RAID 2. Luckily, hardware-based RAID 2 is a cheap, easy, and very viable option for even the most basic PC's now.
    • "Two critical areas that seem to have taken a major hit are quality control and warranties. More and more drives (and in some cases, entire drive families) seem to be failing at every given opportunity. Meanwhile, the length for which they're covered has shrunk back from (typically) three years to the minimum one."

      I know a LOT about Maxtor's warranty service. This statement is misleading.

      If you buy a Maxtor SCSI drive you get a 5-year warranty. If you buy the Maxline drives, you get a three-year warranty. (It's the model they sell to the stores, with the mounting hardware, the cables and the software. Says "Three year warranty on the box")

      The rest of the drive lines have 1 year warranties.

      So, if you normally get a bare drive wrapped in plastic that you got from some Internet distributor, most likely you'll be getting a 1 year warranty. Why do you think it was such a good deal?
    • ...is DivX.

      In fact it's such a huge driver I'm surprised they don't sponsor video codec development and P2P infrastructure outright openly. I recently bought 400 new gigs to grow my media archive slightly; from what my friends and I talk about, I am not the only one who works like this.

      So we're talking volume, volume, volume. Not speed. Not reliability. Not even interface technology. Volume. Higher numbers.

      Am I just blind or has somebody seen a downright sponsorship? It would certainly pay them back...
    • Actually most people only started to use a computer in the last five years, so what do they know about how much harddrive space they'll be using later this year or next year or 5 years from now. Why did they get a computer? Probably because they wanted a typewriter than they could browse the internet with. But slowly they are learning that this device will be useful for storing their music and video collection. When they finally figure that out they'll need these 200GB drives. Or they'll need better compression.
    • Two critical areas that seem to have taken a major hit are quality control and warranties. More and more drives (and in some cases, entire drive families) seem to be failing at every given opportunity. Meanwhile, the length for which they're covered has shrunk back from (typically) three years to the minimum one.


      Not true. While there have been some problems, by and large the reliability has increased. Does anyone remember the old Seagate 40MB drives? Can you honestly say that they were more reliable? What about the 540MB drives? I can recall quite a few lemons in that batch.

      The truth is that many companies are reducing the duration of warranties for accounting reasons unrelated to quality. Drives are actually more reliable for longer periods of time. However, keeping sale information for every drive takes time and effort. While a great deal of this information is electronic, they must also have a paper bill of sale and other info from the retailers for tax purposes. The warrantee info on paper must be housed somewhere. Major hard drive manufacturers sell a lot of drives. That's a lot of paper. That means storage costs -- accessible storage costs.

      It costs them quite a bit of cash to maintain those warranties. The shortened interval has very little to do with drive quality though despite the anecdotal evidence individual Slashdotters may present. (eg. Two people saying that they have had four drives fail in the last year does not a trend make. Think in thousands.)

      For 99% of users, data integrity is the holy grail and everything else comes a distant second. I wish manufacturers would remember that.


      This is what backups are for. No matter how good drives get, there will always be a need for good backups. A lot of people have CD-R/CD-RW drives. A few even have DVD burners. If your important data only exists in one place, how can you say that you consider it important? If you kept all of your important documents, money, and valuable goods in your car, no matter how reliable or secure that car may be, when that car breaks down, you will be screwed. The same holds true of your computer. Make copies. The drive manufacturers are largely a scapegoat.

      And no, I don't work for any hard drive manufacturers nor do any of my friends and family.

  • Reinventing the wheel (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, 2003 @09:35AM (#5101228)
    It's really sad to see everybody on a tech site like Slashdot cheering for a "new" technology that has, in fact, already existed for a long time.

    Firewire. IEEE1394.

    You can get Firewire hard drives right now. You don't have to wait for them. You can get Firewire enabled motherboards right now, too. Nice round, thin cables. Nice hotpluggable connectors. Faster transfer speeds (Firewire2 will leave SATA in the dust).

    • Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @10:03AM (#5101307)
      Except that the platters aren't any faster. The kind of connector you use is meaningless, if the disk can't feed you data faster. Give me a spinde which can kick 50MB/sec across the whole disk, and I'll start to care about the I/O it uses.

    • ??? Well... I don't know about that. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) <rayanami AT gmail DOT com> on Friday January 17, 2003 @10:04AM (#5101309) Journal
      And IEEE1394 is just serial SCSI, so why bother with that technology, just buy Ultra-LVD SCSI drives, operators are available right now.

      The point is serial ATA is a simple ATA-style replacement. The drives will be cheap because the controllers will be cheap.

      Firewire (or SCSI) are not cheap. They are not an equivalent product. Sure, it's BETTER, but it comes at a price some are not willing to pay for an desktop, MP3 server or what have you.
      • When ever somebody talks about hox expensive SCSI is, I have to ask:
        How much did you pay for your sound card?
        How much for your video card?

        I can not tell you how many people will spend 100 bucks on a sound card, or 400 bucks on a 'just released this week' video card, then complain about the cost of SCSI.
        which, by the way, would make video and sound cards, perform better.

    • Faster transfer speeds (Firewire2 will leave SATA in the dust).

      Firewire 2 = 800 Mbps = 100MBps

      SATA = 150MBps

      Firewire 2 faster? Don't think so. Sure, Firewire 2 will ramp up to twice that speed eventually, but so will SATA...

      SATA is also a lot simpler to implement: chipset manufacturers can reuse most of their old, highly-optimized Parallel ATA controller core. Similarly, OS writers can reuse most of their old ATA drivers. SATA has less overhead than Firewire, it's designed for data storage and data storage alone, and it doesn't do daisy chaining.

      Firewire's a nice technology, and it would work for hooking hard drives up internally, but it doesn't do the job as well as SATA does, it's over-complicated (and thus expensive), doesn't have the track record, and probably most importantly, has some serious political opposition (Intel anyone?). It's always going to be the Cinderella of the ball.

    • If I'm not mistaken, USB 2.0 is faster than firewire, and doesn't have all the patents tied to it. My new Gateway system came standard with USB 2.0, Firewire is a custom addon that's nearly unavailable on a desktop unless you build it yourself or buy a Mac.
      • USB 2.0 is slightly faster than firewire (480Mb instead of 400Mb) but firewire has 800, 1600 and 3200Mb speeds in the pipe, as I understand it, for 2003. Even 400Mb/s is only 50MB/s and not the 133+ that serial ATA calls for. However, Firewire is peer-to-peer and therefore won't (ever?) get support from Intel because Intel likes technologies that are tied to CPUs (go figure). USB is host-based; you must have a computer to run it and so is Serial-ATA. With Firewire (also known as i.Link to Sony), you can connect an i.Link video camera to an IEEE 1394 hard drive and record to it; its really that simple.

        If half the money that went into serial ATA went to realizing that IEEE 1394 could be improved to higher speeds, leaving consumers with one generic high-speed interconnect, we'd all be happier I think.
    • thats not true: firewire is much slower than SATA. It is rated at 400Mbit, but may actually achieve about a third of that. SATA is 1.5Gbit in the first release, and you will probably get that (it isnt a shared bus hence the firewire overhead).

    • Serial-ATA is transparent to existing operating system software expecting Parallel-ATA devices. It can also be retrofit easily into motherboards and drives. None of those applies to FireWire.

      FireWire has the same problem relative to USB2. It may or may not be better than USB2, but USB1 is ubiquitous and USB2 is mostly transparent to software--it's just faster.

    • Serial ATA is just slightly under twice as fast as Firewire2, and that is to each drive, whereas that speed is shared among all drives with Firewire.


      However, that is not the most important reason that Serial ATA is better than Firewire for replacing ATA: Serial ATA is compatible with ATA as far as the software is concerned. A Serial ATA controller looks like a regular ATA controller. NO software changes are required in the OS. To go to Firewire, you need to get support in your BIOS for booting, and your OS. Quick, without looking, which Firewire controllers work in Linux? All Serial ATA controllers do.

  • Summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17, 2003 @10:09AM (#5101331)
    Alright so far most of the posts are misguided, so I'll answer a few questions. But first, this was mentioned in the slashback that is still on the front page. Please post any corrections.

    1a. Yeah!, faster drives.
    No. Find me a drive that can use PATA-100 to the max let alone PATA-133 and I'll be a very happy customer. Current drives do not use current capacity, the only time the bus becomes an issue is where you are bursting from the drive cache to the controller, which is not enough to really worry about except in certain situations (The same data is read continuously).

    b. Yeah!, Faster drives.
    No. Why a second point? The first point dealt with bandwidth. This one is for latency. Please remember that most SATA controllers on motherboards, etc (atm at least) are actually a bridging chip to a PATA controller. This incurs a slight latency delay. If you do a lot of small file accesses you will be effected.

    2. Whats the point we already have enough speed?(ie I already know 1.)

    a.The point is smaller cabling, making cases less cluttered, meaning better cooling, and easier to keep wiring neat and out of the way. Why no use rounded cables? You didn't think the cables where a ribbon shape for looks did you? The cables are meant to be ribbons to reduce the interference between each pair (limits it to the pair on each side). Rounding the cables causes all pairs to interfere with each other resulting in a much shorter maximum cable length before there are too many interference errors on the bus.

    b. Point to point cabling, knock a cable loose, or have a misbehaving drive and you loose one drive. With PATA you can loose 2, or with SCSI you can loose up to 14 (Wide, not typically a problem on modern auto-terminating devices)

    c. You can disconnect a drive from a powered controller without risking blowing the controller chip (Possible with PATA). Making removable hard drive cradles finally usefull on ATA systems.

    d. Longer in-spec cable lengths. PATA cables (Sorry I forget the length off hand) can't reach the top 5 1/4" drive bay in a full tower case. SATA cables can. Why not use longer PATA cables? Cables longer than PATA spec tend to suffer badly from interference based errors, resulting in a lot of resends on the bus, sometimes causing bad data on drives.

    3. The performance isn't what I hoped (or a WD JB is faster)

    This drive isn't intended to be the fastest on the block, it is meant to be quiet. Seagate drives have the new fluid bearings, they haven't been the fastest on the block for a while now, what makes you think this one would be different?

    I personally think this is a good drive to be first to SATA, as the people likely to appreciate the quiet drive would also desire the better air flow offered by smaller cables, meaning slower case fans, and a quiter PC.

    4. Why don't they compare a PATA Barracuda V vs a SATA Barracuda V.

    The PATA has a 2mb cache the SATA has an 8mb cache (and a slightly faster access time, by 0.6ms). They aren't directly comparable, the SATA version is obviously aimed to be the top of the line model.

    5. The power connecters. The Barracuda V requires the same power voltages that current PATA drives do, so an adapter works fine. However it was intended to supply drives with multiple voltages (such as 3.3v, 5v, etc) so that the electronics can use a different voltage than the drive motors, reducing the power consumption of the electronics, and therefore the heat output. Some drives get very hot, and every little bit helps.

    I think thats all.

    • Re:Summary (Score:2, Informative)

      by clarkc3 ( 574410 )
      Seagate drives have the new fluid bearings, they haven't been the fastest on the block for a while now, what makes you think this one would be different?

      Methinks you have never looked at seagate model ST373453FC - 3.6ms seek & 15k rpm - sure its not meant for a PC - but shows seagate can still make them pretty fast. Good points on the other stuff about SATA

  • God forbid we get any kind of substantial performance leap all at once... Might drive the prices down too early.. ;)
    • If they up the requirements too early, the SATA prices will be too high and people won't buy. That's why they start off with cheap specs that are barely faster and increase them later.

      Effectively, the same happened with USB1 and USB2: it moved in because it was cheap and they later upped the performance.

  • Playing with SATA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Deton8 ( 522248 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @11:12AM (#5101662)
    I'm playing with my first two SATA drives, and one thing I find very careless is that the connectors are very easy to knock off the drives. This is not a problem for me as I am designing a RAID box where they slide in, but for a PC, somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt. By the way, my IBM SATA drives have the conventional Molex 4 pin power connector for legacy PC applications which you can use instead of the SATA power connector. Seagate was too lazy to put one on their drive, or maybe they need the 3.3V input on the SATA power connector which is not provided for on the Molex connector which is only 5V/12V. Oh, and one other thing, SATA 2.0 phase 2 which will be 300 MB/s won't help at all with performance until and unless the drives go past their present 50 MB/s native transfer rate. Hell, the 150 vs 133 vs 100 agrument of SATA vs PATA is silly when you consider the modest speed requirements of the drives being built today. Raw transfer rate only appears to be increasing 25% per year anyway, so it will be years before we even give a damn about the 150 MB/s "limit".

    • Re:Playing with SATA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Deton8 ( 522248 ) on Friday January 17, 2003 @11:14AM (#5101681)
      Forgot to mention that the 300 MB/s stuff in SATA 2.0 is actually useful for another reason, when this becomes available you will be able to use SATA outside the box, and run a single 300 MB/s link to a port expander chip inside a external chassis, which will in turn connect to a bunch of 150 or 300 MB/s disk drives. So when you aggregate five to ten drives, the extra performance headroom is necessary.
    • somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt

      Just plug 'em in again. It's not a bug, it's just a built-in perpetual demonstration of the hot-swapping feature.

  • its intended purpose was to make the industry transition seamless to allow time to mature the future generations of SATA.

    Strange.

    SCSI is here. Firewire is here. I should give a crap about SATA why? I think companies would do much better to unify standards than diversify, and leave the markets in limbo for months or years.

    Hey, if they just used Firewire internally, they could have all tthe advantages they are working on, and be able to focus on improving firewire. In addition, internal and external hard drives would be identical.

    In addition, they could focus on improving firewire, instead of starting from scratch.
    • Why SATA and not Firewire? Because SATA is backwards compatible with normal ATA. Not all motherboards support firewire, and asking customers to buy add-in firewire cards in addition to a harddrive for an "older" system that doesn't have a built-in firewire controller would drive the price up.
      • For one thing, I generally see Firewire cards cheaper than PCI ATA cards, so the price isn't a big issue.

        Since SATA has different physical connectors, it can't really be backwards compatible. You will need to have an adapter... Of course, you can hook ATA drives up to firewire right now with an inexpensive adapter (ie. A stripped-down FW HDD kit), so Firewire could be said to be backwards compatible as well.
    • Check out a thread where this was discussed [slashdot.org] previously as well. Improving firewire is under way.

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