First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive 143
An anonymous reader writes "CD Freaks has a first look at a S-ATA optical storage drive. Although several S-ATA HD's have been released lately there have been no signs of S-ATA CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD+R drives. S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. However there seem still to be some compatibility issues. "
What is taking so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, people don't like caddies. We need an advancement in error correction before we can think of using even higher density optical media.
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time we have an article on DVD+/- media, or BluRay, or something, we have all these moaners complaining about optical compatibility; they are avoiding, rather than buying, due to some mystical compatibility issue.
If your system can read and write it's own disks, that's all you need! If you can't read someone else's disks, why exactly would *not* buying a DVD+/- drive change that?
I've been using DVD-R for 1 and a half years now, and it's great. Backup of my home directory (which is only 12gb) is easy and convenient.
As per lifetime... my data becomes obsolete within a year, and then it's time for another backup. If you want serious data backup, you'll need a good sized hard drive array and use some data center type software, not optical drives.
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have personaly thrown DLT tapes across a datacenter, dropped them from high tape rails and kicked them across the drop floor. But they still work just fine. They are harty little buggers I am convencedd the only way to beak them is with a hammer or inceneration.
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:4, Informative)
AFAIK, tape still runs at $1/gb, while DVD-R is now $0.20/gb
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:2)
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:2)
Re:What is taking so long? (Score:2)
Re:What is taking so long? (Protecting content) (Score:2)
One trick for DVDs is to stick PAR2 recovery data on them using QuickPar [quickpar.co.uk]. Then, once the ECC on the disc can't keep up with the scratches, you have a window of opportunity during which you can repair the damage using the recovery data. The more recovery data there is on the disc, the more damage that can be sustained and still repaired. Only a scratched ToC track is difficult to recover from (have to use a professional service).
Basic ste
Three letters: DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
The big reason it doesn't happen is that both the RIAA, MPAA, BSA and whatnot got their panties in a bunch over it. They're stalling for "Trusted Computing" to make these devices "trusted".
The reason? Harddrives are general purpose devicves. They will not be very successful in creating copy restrictions like the non-CDs and CSS DVDs. They won't be able to make special DRM-removable HDDs, so they're waiting for all HDDs to be DRM'd. Just you wait and see...
Kjella
Re:Three letters: DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
I promise you that if the business case was there for SATA drives, optical or not, removable or not, then the manufacturers would be rushing them to market. Their motivation to get into your wallet is quite large. Why would they want to wait for DRM to be implemented? It's just one more technology that, if integrated into their devices, will require more licensing agreeme
Compatability Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess I can now confirm that I have no interest in buying anything from SiiG.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Even 52x CD burning is only 7,800 kb/sec. I can see where a SATA drive would be helpful for high speed DVD burning, but even then, if they even developed an ATA-133 model, that should suffice for a number of years.
Don't get me wrong, I love to see newer/faster/better, but I know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method for a device which barely uses the capability of the bus provided anyway.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
It's easter, and I just woke up...
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, for most of us the buffer underrun is a Max CPU utilization issue, but that's beside the point.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:5, Interesting)
The P-ATA cables are what? 4 inches wide and not very flexible (as in, you can't really make a good 90 turn across the cables width). Compare that to the S-ATA cables that are probably an inch wide, can be longer and are easier to place out of the way.
And they don't block airflow as much.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
SATA can go longer distances, at faster speeds, with less bulk, more routing flexiblity & it works for all drives (PATA is too big for 2.5" drives). Additional it's electrically safe for hotplugging. As a bonus we finally get rid of those damn molex connectors.
At the moment it's more expensive, that will change.
Where SATA will of most use is in compact form factor machines - mini/nano-itx, micro-atx, laptops, high density rackmount storage servers etc.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
One more word: spelling.
Sorry... couldn't resist.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Now you're right that SATA cabling is a significant advance - too bad it's a significant advance in price. The cable I got had molded connectors so it probably didn't cost nearly as much more to make than the PATA cables I've had, and with the newer grounded PATA cables (for
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Firewire and SCSI are similar, but from what little I have read on the subject, not identical, neither the command set nor the signaling (the latter is obvious.)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)
The main thing is cabling, and ease of installation. With PATA you have these big, wide cables, and you have to deal with master/slave issues (who hasn't experienced the "computer won't boot when you install a new drive problem, at least once).
With SATA it's not an issue.
Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd pa
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a problem. Make your own unattened install, and add the SATA drivers. Been doing it for a year now, and it's a wondrous thing.
Check out MSFN.org [msfn.org] for more info.
My unattended install (which has grown to a DVD) installs WinXP fully patched, DirectX 9.0b, Office 2k3 (customized to my settings), all of my apps except Firefox, and tweaks my system out. It does it in 45 minutes, with only 1 user intervention (carving drives). It mtakes a couple of days to set it up initially, but once you're done, the maintenance is very low.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)
I've used a number of these things, and they work wonders for cable management. I have an MSI K8T Neo, and run exclusively SATA, with 1 SATA hard drive, 1 PATA hard drives, and 2 PATA optical drives, all through the SATA bus.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers.
When I installed Windows XP on a new machine with a SATA hard drive I didn't need any drivers. The machine doesn't have a floppy drive either.
I understand that you only need to load additional drivers if you want to use SATA RAID functionality - and that would probably be an issue on all OSes (for the moment, anyway)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
I'm not gonna fork over extra coin to Microsoft to get an SP1 rev'd CD, so I have to get SATA drivers from the vendor because my CD most certainly doesn't have Seagate SATA drivers on it.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
you're not kidding! i couldn't believe that WinXP wouldn't allow me to load the drivers off a CD. i don't even have a floppy drive!
i borrowed one from a friend and ended up doing the install.
after, i whip out Fedora Core 1 and begin to install it on my new SATA hard drive. everything installs and boots up nice and smooth
SATA is natively supported by some chipsets (Score:2)
Not true necessarily. I have an Abit IC7 motherboard with a Pentium 4, which uses Intel's 875 chipset. The 875 (and 865) natively support SATA, so you don't need anything special to boot and install your OS. SATA RAID is a different animal (as are all RAID solutions), but straight SATA drives in my machine don't require any
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
So I did, and it worked. XP was released in 2001, before SATA drivers were available in the OS. As such, my CD has no drivers for it. It doesn't matter whether the BIOS can see the drive, it matters whether XP can write to the drive. In my case, it could not, unless I loaded them from floppy during the boot process.
Did you boot from an
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
I assume that part of the reason for wanting a SATA optical drive is convenience, rather than need for the increased speed. Since there's every reason to think that SATA is superior for hard drives, you know that you're going to want a SATA controller. It would be really handy if you could plug your optical drive into that same controller without needing a kludge like a SATA to parallel ATA adapter; that way you'd need only one controller for all your drives. Hence it would be nice to have a SATA capable
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
Just a thought.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Not all users are solely concerned with speed. I'd get it just to clean up the cables.
I end up using one optical drive per channel anyway, because I've found that I do get noticably better speed on optical-to-optical copies rather than making both drives share a channel.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
I know, what is it with that? The fastest single IDE drives I can find can't even show 40MB/s sustained transfer rates (I'm not talking about manufacturer's claims, I'm talking about what I've found with actual testing). So technically, spindle speed, head seek speed and density
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Of course with all of the caveats you get with ATA, I doubt you'll see any performance improvement either way. Oh well.
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
For the same reason we now use USB mice, keyboards and printers. SATA is the evolution of the internal storage interface, so we should migrate everything, not just the devices that can take full advantage of it. A USB mouse never even gets close to taking full advantage of th
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:2)
In this case, it seems that the folks who didn't have an interest in supporting SATA optical drives were the SATA controller manufacturers. It's all well and good to say there's no reason for a manufacturer to go to the trouble of making an SATA optical drive, but if they actual
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Compatability Issues (Score:1)
--
Retail Retreat [retailretreat.com]
dead after 2 comments (Score:1)
Ah well, ah well... (Score:3, Funny)
And as the site appears to be Slashdotted (or close to it), there will continue to be no signs.
Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/71
Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW (Score:5, Informative)
Does anybody have any early reviews on this model? Does this one have problems with SATA controller cards like the model in the article?
native SATA? (Score:1)
On a side note, I'm impressed this fast burner supports vertical mounting. It's too bad you can't get a Sharper Image stereo looking model.
Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW (Score:1, Informative)
A solution?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when have optical drives been needing more bandwidth than PATA can offer?? A friend of mine has TWO 52x cd burners setup on ATA 100, and can burn full speed on both of them simultaneously. So, um, how exactly do SATA optical drives solve anything? (note that I am all in favor of SATA opticals, if for no other reason than the cabling)
Re:A solution?? (Score:5, Informative)
Although I fully admit- starting MS Word will (Max CPU) kill a disk record before just raw HD access.
Re:A solution?? (Score:3, Informative)
hell all but the absolute cheapest CDR's and DVD-r's have burn-proof in one form or antoher nowdays...
maybe that $29.00 Foogiatek 62X burn drive down the street might be suspect as to not have that capability.
I have on a SINGLE Pc at work with 2 ATA-100 connections to handle 4 drives
Re:A solution?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it appears to have a nasty habit of killing the secondary IDE channel (but not primary, even when plugged in as the only device), and then soon killing the i810's graphics on my Trigem Cognac (don't ask...) Another of the same model in the same order ON THE SAME MODEL OF BOARD didn't do that...
Re:A solution?? (Score:2)
Number one, burning under windows vs. burning under linux sucks. Particularly with the new 2.6 kernel's ide burning features..no more ide-scsi emulation, so less overhead. I saw 2 to 3% processor overhead during my last 1x dvd burn.
Number two, fifth rule of hardware building: never put burners and hard drives on the same ide channel, if you can help it.
Re:A solution?? (Score:2)
Re:A solution?? (Score:2)
That's awesome! Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery!
Why not Firewire? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure of all the details/exactly why, though PATA and SATA are both (significantly) faster than Firewire (even Firewire 800).
USB2 is 480 Mbit/sec, Firewire 800 is 800 Mbit/sec, PATA is 133 MByte/sec, SATA is 150 MByte/sec (so both nearly 2x Firewire 800).
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:3)
The drive manufacturers keep looking for a faster interface, but they haven't improved their real-world transfer speeds much since Ultra 66.
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:2)
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:2)
Well, that would just be a reason to use Firewire 800, rather than the older, slower firewire spec.
You don't know of any drives currently using more than 100MB/sec do you? Didn't think so.
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:2)
That's because there is no reason why... It's just arbitrary.
Some of the first firewire cards sold had a firewire port on the PCI card that could only be accessed from inside the case, so it was obviously designed for use with things like firewire hard drives internally.
About the only one that has a reason is PATA. You can't really use
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:4, Informative)
SATA is a port, not a bus. You get one device per port, period. No more master/slave bullshit.
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:1)
Firewire is ALWAYS better than USB2.0 for CPU (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:2)
Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:2)
What most people don't apparently know is that Firewire is actually an implimentation of SCSI. By switching to Firewire drives, we're essentially getting the advantages of serial SCSI (and a chunk of the Fibre Channel market too).
You didn't mention that Firewire is bus powered, so no more of the power cables required by SATA. Plus, you could seriously reduce the complexity of PCs.
Just imagine, instead of Parallel, Serial
Future Outlook (Score:3, Insightful)
Good example is DVD formats, DVD+R, -R, -RW, +RW, RAM (2x 4x 8x... I havent seen much development in 8x media, tho the drives have been out for about 4 months). In order for any format to survive, we need the pioneers to force the standard to be adapted, and only then can the industry move forward.
Hard Drives are the same way, I haven't seen any drive trying to change from the "standard" magnetic technology. Sure some are Trying different ideas, to reach that 1 terabyte drive and some trying holographic technology. (Story is dated back in 1996 -- http://www.businessweek.com/1996/16/b347193.htm)
People are relying on the Push of technology to drive their home computers, office computers, and Heck, most cars come with a better computer then what I am running.. So why not push all this new technology.
Re:Future Outlook (Score:2)
Unfortunately, lots of companies think they are "pioneers" or "a leading manufacturer" and they have different opinions so you get the mess that is DVD formats. There is no one "pioneer" in the DVD formats.
Re:Future Outlook (Score:2)
Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reduced cable clutter alone will improve airflow over RAM and around the drives themselves.
What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.
But, as with all new technology, we'll see how things turn out in the coming months. Hopefully, this will make an official appearance on the first x86-compatible mobos with PCI-Express slots.
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:2, Interesting)
Only SATA 2.0 will solve this problem, but it's still a couple of years away.
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:1)
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:2)
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:2)
I found it does.
I was copying a CD between two optical drives on the same channel, the best it could do was 12x, at 16x it would have to stop several times to reload the buffers. When I had each drive on its own channel, the buffers stayed full at 16x the whole time. My DVD writer doesn't write CDs faster than 16x.
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:1)
Unless you can think of a reason to throw out an 80gig HDD just because you bought a new 120gig.
And that is ignoring the far-future technology known as '80-connector cables'.
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:4, Insightful)
And two SATA cables are still much nicer than one IDE cable...
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:2)
I simply don't agree. Two cables the size of a CAT-5 ethernet cable are still easier to use than one which is flat and two inches wide (or so).
Sure, that cable *can* reach up to the next bay, and in my computer it does exactly that. But it's a biotch getting the drives in and out, and getting the cable routed up there properly, and so on. And chance forbid your drives should have their IDE ports
XP Setup & S-ATA (Score:2)
Re:XP Setup & S-ATA (Score:2)
Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:2)
The problem is that BTX introduces nothing that can't be introduced on ATX instead.
My Compaq worksation is an eATX case with three cooling duct-like zones.
The card cage (PCI, AGP) has its own fan.
The power supply has a 12cm fan that also draws air directly across the hard drives.
The memory, chipset and CPUs have its own third duct, with one inta
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Recently we have been given the opportunity to take a look at one of the first S-ATA drives that is under development. The drive we received was a test model and will probably never ever reach the market. It was still intresting to see this new development and we took the opportunity to make some early tests. From our tests it seems that current available S-ATA controllers are not yet ready to be used with optical storage drives and we expect that this will improve when more S-ATA chipsets will be released. S-ATA will be the follow up of the current ATAPI/IDE drives that have dominated the hard disk and optical storage market for years. The technology brings easier to attach and smaller cables, no more master/slave settings, theoretically more speed and hot swappability, meaning you can replace the drive will the computer is on. The coming time we will probably see more releases of S-ATA drives but expectations are that large OEM orders from the likes of Dell and HP will speed up the process of the development in the end of 2004. Market expectations are that the entire market will be S-ATA in 2007, according to our sources. Check out our first look here.
From the thread:
We came into posession of one of these "experimental" CDRW drives and thought it might be interesting to have a look at it and share our findings with the forum. Our best information at this time is that this drive will not be released any time soon. It was under development for a large OEM customer of LiteOn, who decided they were not interested in the drive. So if LiteOn does release it, it will be probably sometime in 2005. LiteOn does not have any firm plans at present for any other SATA drives that we know of. As long as there are IDE ports on motherboards, there's not much demand for this drive. So this drive is mainly just a novelty at this time. But it may give a clue or 2 about the direction we can expect CDRW to be headed. The drive's model number seems to be similar to the recently announced SOHR-5238S which is slated to replace the revered 52327S burner. However we have other info that suggests the 52A8S may have a different chipset than the 5238S. Untill we can open up a 5238S and look inside, we cannot know. The first thing that becomes obvious with this drive is that SATA controllers do not like it. Our source of info tells us that it seems to work very well with chipset-based SATA controllers, and not very well with PCI-based controllers. I have an onboard SIL-3112 controller (PCI-based) and also a SIIG PCI SATA controller card (also SIL-3112 chip). The drive will run on both of these controllers, but there are deffinite problems with firmware flashing and Kprobe scanning. I was able to flash firmware on the SIIG card, but not on the onboard controller. Kprobe causes the entire PCI bus to freeze up if you try to access the drive, not a pleasant experience. LTNFlash will read the firmware on either controller, but not write F/W except on the SIIG card. Whether these issues are due to drivers or BIOS on the controllers is anyone's guess. Another observation about the SIIG controller: Here's a reading curve at full speed on the SIIG card; What's interesting is that the drive did not actually slow down during this read, and the disc was a near-perfect CDR. So there appears to be some very strange bottleneck for data that is looking like a drive slow-down. Confirmed this oddity in DVDInfo: also, I was getting very high CPU usage readings on the SIIG card, running upwards of 40% but only in CDSPeed, not on my system monitor. So, I decided to put the drive on the onboard controller and here's the result: (much better) Again, this is the exact same SATA chip, with slightly different BIOS. I tried a number of different versions of drivers on the controller, even the driver form the SIIG card, but could not resolve the issues with the LiteOn utilities. I noted that on the OB controller, CPU usage is reported as normal, and burst rate measurement went from 8 on the SIIG card to 19 on the O
Re:Mirror (Score:3, Insightful)
That's quite a generalization based on such limited experience with SATA optical drives and one rep at SIIG. Based on the Thread text, it seems that the problems with optical drives lie primarily with the host controller firmware and secondarily with the drivers. Considering that SATA optical
NON PHP Link (Score:4, Informative)
Shows all the pictures as well as text
cdfreaks [cdfreaks.com]
Standard drawers. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are many IDE drawers out there on the market, but they are not mechanically compatible. Its a shame, because HDs could seriously replace floppies if we could just bring them along with us without worying about plugin them in.
Re:Standard drawers. (Score:3, Informative)
Firewire hard drives are:
Mechanically compatible
Hot pluggable
Battery powered
Bus powered
Portable
Small
Re:Standard drawers. (Score:2, Informative)
"Oh, look! SATA supports 150MB per second on each channel - Firewire is only 50MB. Drives on SATA must be faster!!"
Fucking retards. Ah, well...
Re:Standard drawers. (Score:2)
Re:Standard drawers. (Score:2)
But do what you will. I've been using firewire drives for three years now, and they're awesome. Plug into my desktop, into my laptop, into my friend's computer...
Of course, my first, and what sold me on the idea, drive was an iPod!
Re:Standard drawers. (Score:2)
Except for the physical limitations of the medium. (Score:3, Interesting)
S-ATA ? (Score:4, Funny)
What about SCSI DVD+RW (Score:2)
I have a plethora of SunGear yet all I can find out there are IDE or FireWire.
Why are there no SCSI drives?
SATA Optical Drives - I've been waiting for this.. (Score:2)