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Hardware

The Coming of Serial ATA 240

Posted by CmdrTaco from the faster-is-better dept.
GrendelT writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the newest Serial ATA gadgets that are soon to hit the market. With speeds of 150Mb/s, thinner and longer cables, backwards compatibilty with Parallel ATA (what most of us have right now), and the option of being hot-pluggable, it seems the next step in storage technology is upon us."
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The Coming of Serial ATA More

The Coming of Serial ATA

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  • W00T! (Score:2, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 )
    Just in time for Doom 3!

    • Pointless unless it's integrated and RAID 0 (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Read the article. If you add a PCI Serial ATA card to an existing mobo you'll get max 133MB/sec which if i recall sounds familiar to parallel ata.

      Not until serial gets its own bus will it be better. Until then just wait for the stuff to get cheaper.

  • Great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Corporate Troll ( 537873 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:28PM (#4057461) Homepage Journal
    Now we just need harddisks that can sustain a 150Mb/s data-transfer rate.
    • A-Men!

      I can't believe that speeds for IDE hard drives have remained at 7,200 rpm and I've heard no word of faster revisions. It'll be nice actually use the bandwidth benefits for a change.
      • 10k rpm scsi have been available for a while, but they are noisy as hell, not something you would want in a consumer computer, they are also a good amount more expensive. Plus it guves scsi an additional advantage over ide.
    • Now we just need harddisks that can sustain a 150Mb/s data-transfer rate.

      The reason this is useful is that you have a larger bus bandwidth, not that it benefits any one particular device.


      Having a faster bus, and more addressable devices will give SCSI some serious competition. Being able to effectively handle a larger number of devices, a RAID stripe of fast devices might actually be able to do something with this newfound bandwidth. Add in devices like CDRW, DVD-RW, etc, and you can see where the bus bandwidth can become a limiting factor.


      For many users, however, even the current 33/66/100 ATA revisions are more than enough... when you're just pulling data from a single hard drive, the extra bandwidth means nothing.

      • Yah, but... (Score:3, Informative)

        by DragonHawk ( 21256 )
        "The reason this is useful is that you have a larger bus bandwidth, not that it benefits any one particular device."

        Too bad Serial ATA is a point-to-point bus. One device per host interface.
    • RAID. ATA100 and ATA133 are already a major bottleneck compared to real server array setups (which use SCSI). 150MB/sec is just another bottleneck.
      Those high maximum rates are not meant to be useful for current single drives. Remember, people made the same complaints when ATA66 came out. Now we have drives that are significantly faster than ATA33--it's just a matter of who gets ahead first, the interface standard or the hardware.
      • You do know that serial ATA supports only one drive per channel, don't you?
        • No, actually I thought that it supported multiple drives, but like parallel ATA only one could be accessed at a time, and that SATA was able to queue commands similar to SCSI to improve performance in this situation. I'll have to read up on it a bit more I suppose, thanks for the info.

  • Darnit.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by TheKubrix ( 585297 )
    Now I gotta rewrite the app for espressos machine :\

  • Cool... (pun intended) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reezle ( 239894 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:29PM (#4057472) Homepage
    This ought to help air-flow in the case a lot.
    My worst problem building mini-towers has been trying to tack the ribbon cables to the side where they won't block air, or run into a fan blade...

    Screw the speed, etc... It's just a better cable :)
    • They already make standard IDE cables like this one [tigerdirect.com] that are round instead of flat ribbons. Of course, the connectors still have to be 20 pins wide, so it's not perfect, but it is much better than the standard cable for airflow and space.

      DennyK
      • Yeah, that's just the kind of contortions I'd rather get away from... Take a hard look at that picture, and tell me that it's good engineering..
        • I'm looking at the picture right now.

          The engineering looks fine. You can see that there is a definate section near each connector where some rigidity-enhancing substance has been applied to the ribbon, to keep things from fraying back to the IDE connector.

          Conductors toward the extreme edges don't look like they're under undue stress.

          The whole thing is packed into some kind of inexpensive, flexible jacketing material which is loose-fitting enough to allow the conductors to move within, which reduces stress on the wire.

          Engineering-wise, it look+s justfine. The quesition remains as to whether or not ATA-100 can tolerate being shredded like this, however - the specification calls for alternating signal and ground wires on a flat ribbon. But it does appear from the photograph that it has been split into pairs of wire consisting of one signal and ground wire each, which, given the circumstances, is also good engineering practice.

          (and, 'sides, I've never heard anyone complain about overall flakiness with such cables. And every wire I've ever purchased from c2go has been of good to exceptional build quality, including some custom multi-conductor audio cables I had them build a few years back. The solder joints were beautiful.)

          Contorted? Obviously. Bad engineering? Naah.
      • Speaking of the rounded cables, can anybody speak as to how well they work? I had heard horror stories about the first generation of them, but I haven't for a while?

        Are they as reliable as the ribbon connectors? Are the ground wire/signal wire pairs twisted or free-running?

        Basically, given that cooling/looks aren't a problem for me, but finding reliable cables is, should I try one of the rounded ones?

      • Don't use rounded IDE cables. (Score:5, Informative)

        by rogerwong ( 104575 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @06:20PM (#4057782) Homepage
        Just say no to round ATA133 cables. Every other wire on an 80-wire IDE cable is a ground. It's there to shield the data wires from one another.

        When you bunch the individual wires up like that, you destroy the shielding. At high data transfer speed, you are going to get CRC errors due to interference, and this means lower performance as the IDE controller has to deal with them.

        Rounded cables are suitable for low speed applications like CDROM and floppy drives.
        • "When you bunch the individual wires up like that, you destroy the shielding."

          Good round IDE cables have shielding around individual wires, and between rows, to keep things working. Like most things with the IBM-PC, there is considerable variation in quality (and price). People need to realize that getting an I/O cable for a buck might not be a good thing...
        • IDE cables (100 & 133) ARE available in rounded braided cables. Braiding the cable, when done correctly, cancels out most of the crosstalk that is the reason for that extra shielding. SCSI round cables are braided for much the same reason.

  • IEEE 1394? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bo-eric ( 263735 )
    Why not use 1394 for internal devices as well as external? Is it too bloated/expensive?

    • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:2, Informative)

      by MrChuck ( 14227 )
      why?

      cause an ideal 40MB/s max isn't really a lot to write home about.

      OTOH, with just two disks/channel, it's more than most single drives can emit.

    • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Probably. Besides, serial ATA is designed to be software-compatible with the old ATA. So you will still be able to use older operating systems with the new ATA, whereas firewire might not be supported.
    • Or even better, equip everything with Bluetooth. Just drop harddisks, memory, processor etc inside your box and turn the the damn thing on. Now we just need a good way to send wireless eletricity.....
      • Tesla coil PCs! Now that would require some interesting shielding around the sensitive stuff, but admit it - a truely cable-free PC would be oh-so-awesome. ^_^

        --Knots;

    • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:39PM (#4057536)
      That's what I originally thought, too. But the story title is a typo: They're talking about 150MegaBytes/sec, not bits.

      The next version of firewire on the horizon will only be able to do 100Megabytes/sec (800Megabits/sec).

      Still, I'd much rather they dump Serial ATA altogether and concentrate on FireWire. 100Megabytes/sec is just plenty, and FireWire is a much more general and flexible standard.

      • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mz001b ( 122709 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:42PM (#4057550)
        Still, I'd much rather they dump Serial ATA altogether and concentrate on FireWire. 100Megabytes/sec is just plenty, and FireWire is a much more general and flexible standard

        But a very important design point in serial ATA is that it is completely backwards compatible with parallel ATA. No software need change. This is not the case if we were to drop *ATA in favor of firewire. Now you can upgrade at your leasure, and mix and match (convertors exist to plug your old drives onto a serialATA cable).

        • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Cramer ( 69040 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @06:06PM (#4057688) Homepage
          Firewire is a physical transport layer for SCSI[*] which has been around for a very long time. The rub is simply the lack of drives with a native firewire interface. Everything I've ever seen contains a IDE/1394 bridge.

          Firewire is a more generalized interface -- storage, video, communications, etc. Where Serial ATA is (at the moment) 100% focused on storage. This is where the current bloody ATA mess comes from (IDE was engineered for hard drives and then people started plugging other crap on the chain.)

          * Technically, ATA is a physical transport for SCSI too. It's just in a red-headed, bastard, step-child fashion.

      • Re:IEEE 1394? (Score:2, Informative)

        by InfernoBlade ( 472055 )
        The next version of firewire on the horizon will only be able to do 100Megabytes/sec (800Megabits/sec).
        Wrong.
        Source [e-insite.net]

        IEEE 1394b allows extensions to 800Mbit/sec., 1.6Gbit/sec. and 3.2Gbit/sec., all over copper wire. It supports long-distance transfers to 100 meters over a variety of media: CAT-5 unshielded cable at 100Mbit/sec., existing plastic optical fiber at 200Mbits/sec., next-generation plastic optical fiber at 400Mbit/sec. and 50-micron mulitmode glass optical fiber at up to 3.2Gbit/sec. The improved speed and distance capabilities of 1394b result from two major improvements: overlapped arbitration and advanced data encoding.

        The next gen can do over 320 MB/sec, even accounting for serial transfer overhead.
  • Maybe the article had a typo (I'm about to read the links) - and given the smaller cables are great, but why is ~19MB/sec transfer speed really all that much news? Isn't SCSI160 almost 10x that? (granted no disks can do 160MB/s, and SCSI is shared...)

  • next up.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by citroidSD ( 517889 ) <citroidsd@yahoo.FREEBSDcom minus bsd> on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:31PM (#4057487)
    serial cable to replace USB. oh wait...
  • ANYTHING to keep from scraping my damn knuckles or cracking fingernails when removing a drive is fine with me.

    I would've been happy with a connector technology based on FireWire [1394ta.org], but if this is cheaper, as easy to connect as FireWire, and no slower than current ATA, then break out the pinatas filled with old hard drives and the Louisville Sluggers.

  • NAS.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FuzzyMan45 ( 451645 )
    This is going to be great for NAS applications and managing racks of drives. Ultrafast buses all to one and another. Great for network backup too. I havent looked at prices yet, but hopefuly it's not too expensive to implement in a home environment.

  • That's 150 MBytes/Sec (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MushMouth ( 5650 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:32PM (#4057492)
    Come on guys, that is one of the biggest details on the story
  • Besides the backwards compatability, how is this better than FireWire?

    I'd really like to see one standard for internal and external drives and other devices. Internal FireWire hasn't caught on because the drive are just ATA. I'd bet Serial ATA catches on much faster... oh well.

    • Oh, 150MBytes/s... ok that's faster than current FireWire.

    • Re:FireWire? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      That an FireWire manufacturers don't want to give up their tasty tasty profit margins. The only reason ATA is even still around is because the drives are cheap. I'd bet if the manufacturers were willing to sell SCSI devices at consumer prices (say $25 to $40 more per drive over ATA to cover the cost of the electronics) most Slashdotters would be running SCSI and would scoff at ATA and lump it in with built-in video, built-in sound, and the built-in modems on consumer machines.

      I hate ATA, but I still run it in my machines because I can't justify the 100%+ markup for SCSI devices. Heck, it's still really hard to get Command Tagged Queueing support on ATA devices, and the CTQ implementations I've seen have been at best half assed.
    • Speed. Even the next generation of Firewire will only be 2/3 as fast as Serial ATA (as many have said, it's 150MB/s, not Mb/s). Not that there are any drives that fast yet...
  • 150 Mb/sec seems to imply megabits. SerialATA can transer 150 megabytes/sec.
    • I don't know why everyone else keeps just putting whatever they feel like but I always use these conventions when writing about data: mbps (ALL LOWERCASE) = megaBITS in BASE10 per second. MB/sec (BOTH UPPERCASE) = megaBYTES in BASE2 per second. Oh BTW, for those looking for controllers, 3ware, http://www.3ware.com has mentioned they'll have SerialATA versions of their RAID5 controllers in 4, 8, 12, and 16 channel versions next quarter via converter bridges, and probably native SATA-II controllers. What dissapoints me most is the power connector. 15 pins? Come on. I thought power was going to be included in the 7 pin cable. Now we have a power cable 2x larger than the data cable, and it's still going to be a pain.
  • I realize this is to provide for the third voltage but I hope the power cable will still be small. Don't want to end up using up the same amount of space as Parallel ATA and be back to square one.
    • because (hee hee) it says it uses:
      3 connectors per voltage offered:
      Positive, negative and ground

      Computer scientology in use there. My electronics taught me:
      Voltage, and a (shared) ground. so 4 voltages needs 5 wires.

      But that's Toms Hardware for you.

      • Of course, they could be doing this like conventional home AC wiring, in which case, 4 voltages would need six wires: the four voltages, a neutral (commonly mistaken as "negative" in home wiring - it carries no potential difference from gound when things are working correctly) and ground.

        Now, in a properly wired system, neutral and ground should both be the same, but both wires are there so that, in the event something goes wrong, excess potential can bleed off along the ground wire while the neutral wire remains neutral vis-a-vis the voltage (ie, the potential difference between the +5V wire and the neutral wire will always be 5.0V, even if excess potential has caused the ground wire to be bleeding off voltage).

        It's also possible that Tom's Hardware is essentially correct, however poorly it's worded - I don't know anything about Serial ATA, but I do know that by having a "positive" and "negative" wire on opposite sides of neutral at a given voltage, one can get twice the voltage. This is how home 240V works here in the US. A house has four wires going in to the mains - a ground, a neutral, and two 120V lines on opposite sides of neutral (commonly referred to as +120 and -120, though this isn't really quite right). The point is that by using either 120 feed with the neutral wire, one gets a potential difference of 120, but by using the two 120s without the neutral, one has a potential difference of 240. So, if they're providing a (to adopt conventional terminology) +5, -5, +3, -3, +2, -2, +12, and -12, (somewhat random number selection)then you have 2V, 3V, 4V, 5V, 6V, 10V, 12V, and 24V available.In this case there would be only four voltages supplied (2, 3, 5, and 12), each in two forms, but ten wires (+2, -2, +3, -3, +5, -5, +12, -12, 0, and ground). Again, the net result could be reduced to nine wires if they chose to abandon an independent ground and neutral.

  • hardly a new next step (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sure an obvious evolution that we've been waiting for for a year, but nothing ground breaking or new. iSCSI has been hot in the news for a long time (yawn, nobody buying it yet that I've seen).

    So newer, faster, tastes more like real cheese. Disks are as unreliable as ever and are not close to following moore's law in speed up. Real use throughput (dd doesn't count) it still real uses. And its still 2 channels per card.

    Tom's HW isn't the most interesting/accurate site either: Revelations that serial can be faster than a com port!.
    /me looks at a fiber, a T3, USB (1 or 2), Firewire - hell, apple's ADB covers that. No revelations there except for the windows users.

    Oh yeah, that's the audience. It's like reading USA Today for news insight. It will leave you hungry.

    • Disks are as unreliable as ever and are not close to following moore's law in speed up.

      Well, Moore's law was actually about the number of transistors on a die [intel.com] and not about speed at all. While drives have not gotten significantly faster over the years, their density has grown by an unbelievable amount. The first hard drive I ever used was on a Mac. That was probably 15 years ago, and was a 20MB drive. I can now go buy a 200GB drive (10,000 times bigger!) for less money in a smaller case. And the fact that you can even build a system which can hold a hundred gigs speaks wonders for the reliability of hard drives. Can you imagine the uptime on a drive farm of 10,000 drives? Do you know how many would fail every hour? It would have been a challenge to build a 200GB data farm at any price in 1985. It is a shame about the speed though. Seek times are what, like 10% of what they used to be?
      • Yes- people abuse Moore's law quite often. If you read a lot of tech publications, it might seem like Moore's law means that everything in your computer gets twice as fast, costs half as much, runs twice as cool, and gets twice as sexy every 18 months. Increasing the number of transistors on a die can contribute to those, but thats not what Moore's law is about.
  • Man, this will be great if it means that RAID will finally be cheap and readily available for the home market. Nobody that I know (including me) backs up their home systems nearly often enough, and the bigger that drives get, the less likely regular backup becomes.

    Homes may not need five 9's availability, but losing a year or two worth of email, tax records, game saves, etc due to a hardware crash is just terrible. This is near to my heart, 'cause I just lost a 1-year old half-full 60 gigger last weekend. How I wish I'd used a mirrored set instead!

    • A RAID mirror will only save you from hardware failure.

      If you accidentally nuke your files, get hit by a virus, or Windows eats intself (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE), you will have two very excellent copies of the same missing/damaged data.

      You need real backups, not a RAID mirror.
      • actually what you want is what netapp offers, raid mirroring across units with redundancy everywhere and snapshot features that keep hourly and daily backups going back 8 hours and 7 days in our setup. We of course back this up to tape for archival storage, but when the sales executive nukes that presentation that they have to give in 15 minutes I calmly re-explain how to copy the files out of the read only snapshot directory for the 3rd time this quarter =) Do we pay for it, sure as far as cost/MB goes it's probably horrible, but the data is always there, and for us that is most important, and besides they basically remove a tape person and replace him with better hardware.
    • What we really need is for all this research going into increasing disk density, to get applied to tape. I want a $1000 tape drive that can write a terabyte to a $10 tape cartridge.

  • ...to be followed almost immediately by the posting of 50+ case mod articles on slashdot.

  • Nice number of IDE devices for the ABIT boards (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:45PM (#4057568) Journal
    The IT7-MAX2 can therefore handle eight conventional IDE devices, as well as two serial ATA devices.

    10 IDE devices. This is what I want to see with serial ata, is more devices. 4 IDE isnt enough, at least with newer motherboards with built in raid/fast ata, you get 8, but if you want 1 per channel for the best possible speed it limits it to 4.

    Currently, I have 2 IDEs one on each fast ata on the mobo, and I get about 47 peak, and 34Meg sustained with IDE. Be nice when the 2 device on a channel is killed off.

  • Speed... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wilburdg ( 178573 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:45PM (#4057571)
    The speed of this product really isn't the selling point, at least not now. Most 7200 ATA drives can't sustain much more than 40MB/s, let alone 150MB/s. The current ATA 133 is already overkill. The selling points are the small cable, the decreased voltage (signal voltage decreased from 5v to 150mv), the length increase, the future posibilities, and the adoption of much more popular serial design (similar to firewire and usb).
    • It's also about standardized hotplugability. By defining a standard that allows for a non cabled (sled) solution with standards for hotplugging Serial ATA will give SCSI a run for its money in the lower end of the server/workstation market. I for one can't wait for a cheap 4 drive raid 5 controller from 3ware with real hotplug and decent cable lengths, not to mention a file server with 16 drives in raid 5 pulling a full 133MB/s (well you would really use probably 14 with a pair of hot standby's, but using 180GB disks that still gives 2.5TB's of usable storage!)
      • I for one can't wait for a cheap 4 drive raid 5 controller

        Under Linux, you're going to spend a fortune for the "RAID 5" on the box. Software RAID under Linux is better than most low-end hardware RAID solutions. Just get the 4 drive IDE controller and tell your Linux box to RAID 5 it.
        • except 3ware's stuff isn't exactly low-end, they use i960 embedded processors and some pretty good caching algorithms to make the array fly. They do the raid 5 parity calculations in hardware and you can have up to I believe 128MB of cache ram. All that for under $100 for the 4 channel escalade 6410. Oh did I mention that they support hot standby (not so usefull on the 4 channel cards but a must on the 8 and above). Software raid5 on a high throughput file server would be stupid, just when you need performance the most the cpu will be choking on IO and parity calculations, no thanks.
  • A bit off topic, but the problem right now isn't quite the bus-system of harddrives but the physical make of the harddrives themselves. Serial ATA is nice, and sure took a long time, but it's not the performance booster we all long for.

    What we need is solidstate harddrives. Equal or slower that normal RAM, a 10 gig solid-state drive would be so much faster than any mechanical solution like our current harddrives are.

    The news you hear about harddrives are byte-density, which granted, do improve speed. But I would have figured that with the cheap cheap prices of RAM and such, that a mainstream company would sell a solidstate solution.

  • is: $$$??
    • initially a couple bucks more for the drives at most, over time, cheaper as the parts are easier to make. Not sure what you will get gouged for an add on card, but there are already motherboards out with them onbaord that basically don't cost any more than equivilant boards without it.

  • But that cable looks just like a hammer to me.

  • Article seems fluffy (Score:5, Funny)

    by linuxhack ( 413769 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:57PM (#4057642)
    Parallel data transfer (sending data along a number of parallel routes) has always meant a large number of wires and
    high frequency signals prone to electrical interference.
    Huh? I thought serial connections used higher frequencies to make up for the fewer data channels.
    In short: connecting more than one device to a ribbon cable is a job we wouldn't wish upon our worst enemy.
    Err, yeah... I managed to get my Athlon XP installed and attached the heat-sink without crushing the core, but man was I unprepared for the hell that involved plugging in those IDE cables!
    Serial ATA Controller: PCI Only
    Damnit! Those basdards are always forcing us to upgrade! Change one part and you need a whole new motherboard! I have all these extra ISA alots and I can't use them? OK, so now I'm just being silly...
    • Huh? I thought serial connections used higher frequencies to make up for the fewer data channels.


      Actually, it's the combination of those two which is the problem. If you have 8 wires in close proximity with different very high frequency signals, it's likely there will be crosstalk between the wires, causing loads of errors. On the other hand, If you only have 2 very high frequency wires, in not so close proximity (I'm pretty sure that they are on opposite sides of the connector), you get much less crosstalk, at potentially higher overall bandwidths.
    • Serial ATA Controller: PCI Only

      Actually I believe that this is in reference to integrating the controller into the chipset which would give >133 MB/s bandwidth.
  • Just another slow news day at Tom's. It's not like you can actually go and buy these things yet. Even if you could, would you unless you were going to buy a whole new computer anyway? Does anyone want to throw out their old drives and replace them all with new ones just because they exist?
    It will be nice to get rid of those huge cables though.
  • Quoted from tom:
    However, this elegant new standard does have its limitations. Serial ATA adapters use the PCI bus, which restricts the theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 150 MByte/s to the 133 MByte/s that the PCI bus allows.

    I bought an adaptec 29160 a while ago. The card is sort of extended for 64bit PCI. I went back to fry's for years after I bought it to find a desktop class mobo to support it.

    All I could find was dual CPU mobo's with 160scsi already built in! Why isn't there a single CPU board that supports 64bit PCI?

    Maybe I just haven't looked in a while, but I was at fry's last saturday (when I saw the via eden board) and looked for a 64bit PCI mobo for my p4, nothing but high end dual mobo's had it.

    Anyone got any thoughts? Suggestions? Please?

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gavitron_zero ( 544106 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @06:20PM (#4057775)
    Look at those benchmarks. If they can match a Parallel ATA drive with only 8 wires, imagine what they could do if they used as many as the parallel ATA drive.
  • Parallel ATA has never been able to mix read/writes out to the bus like SCSI has*. Anyone know if Serial ATA is different because you don't daisy-chain SATA cables like Parallel-ATA does? Are SATA devices buffered from each other?

    *SCSI has the ability to disconnect devices, meaning that you can send drive0 a read request & disconnect from the bus, and then send drive1 a write request while you're waiting for drive0's relatively slow mechanical storage to stream out the response. Parallel ATA makes the bus wait for a response from a read request before anything else happens, basically blocking off drive1 even though bus traffic is idle.
  • I've been reading through the postings and I read that article on Tom's this morning. I've been following Serial ATA for a while now and there is some information that is apparently obscure that most people dont understand...so...I will try to create a list of the good qualities of Serial ATA to help you guys sort through the crap:

    1) It is backwards compatible with your current drives.
    Now most of you might not care about this but it actually saves alot of money for motherboard makers when it comes to designing a board to support it. Less pins means less tracings which means lower development and production costs which means cheaper motherboards. Not to mention, manufacturers of drives dont have to seriously retool their lines and redesign their drives...which means no elevated hard drive cost when you buy new drives. Also there are adapters out there for current drives (as demonstrated in the article) so that you dont have to format and reinstall when you upgrade your motherboard.

    2) It is built with the future in mind.
    Much like original ATA, Serial ATA was designed with room to grow. Sure, it supports up to 150MB/s right now with no drives to go along with it...but when those drives come along (in 5+ years) it will be there to support it....and faster. The standard can ramp up in speeds.

    3) Chipsets will now be easier to design.
    With less pins to worry about in the design of the bridge chipset that serves as the interface for the drives, these interfaces become simpler to design...and you will be able to add more drives to the machine than ever before. You shalt no longer be limited to 4 drives in your box requiring a slow PCI adapter to connect them to (whoever thought that was a good idea anyways?).

    4) Lower power requirements.
    I shouldnt have to elaborate on that....I have to have a 450watt PSU in my current box just to handle the load. It will be nice when I can step that down to a 400watt. Nuff said.

    5) HOT PLUGGABLE DRIVES!!!
    You have no idea how long I have waited for this. Put a second drive in a removable slot....copy my 40GBs of 'files' onto it...take it over to a friends place...put the drive in...give him a copy of the 'files'. Oooooh....and backups to hard drives that you can easily remove and take to a safe deposit box. I don't really need to explain how beneficial this is.

    6) Thin thin thin thin cables.
    I have to run a water cooling kit in my PC because the airflow is so atrocious in my mid-tower with my RAID 0+1 system and 4 drives. 80 pin connectors have really needed to go for a long time. Rolled cables helped a bit but they are still thick and cumbersome. Of course now I stand the chance of confusing my CDROM audio connector with my ATA connector...but thats a small price to pay when i get another 30 CFM's through my box just by changing some cables around.

    These are just a few of the reasons that serial ATA is a good good goooooooood thing.

    Stop slamming what you dont understand.

  • Multiple devices on a single channel? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YuppieScum ( 1096 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @06:33PM (#4057908) Journal
    We all know (or should) that putting both a master and slave device on a single IDE channel impairs performance.

    How is performance impacted by having multiple devices on a Serial-ATA chain? Is is even possible? Will multiple-device cables need a terminator on the end, just like SCSI? Why didn't Tom answer these questions?
  • how are the Case modding geeks going to separate themselves from the rest of the mortal PC geeks if they can't be the only ones to have those neat rounded IDE cables and everybody has practical Serial ATA ones?
    Seriously, I think that this will clear up so much space in the case that modding will gain a whole new element.
    I can just picture a Desk with the PC integrated wholly into it, without the limitations on the IDE cables being so close to the controller cards the parts can be spread out much more, into more ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing PC designs...
    I personally just want an external serial ATA adapter so I can just use a "Standard" hard drive for transporting data vs the USB ones or Optical media.
  • Apple, when designing the Firewire physical port looked into what it would take to build a rugged, tough, port that would accept the rigors of being connected and unconnected repeatedly. In their search, the y found that Nintendo had already done this with the design of their GameBoy link cables.. and thus, used the Nin design for firewire (well, slightly modified).

    And let me tell you - how much i plug in and unplug FW devices, i'm sure glad that its like that..

    knowing the PC users that i do (you know, covers never on, harddrives mounted with paper wrap so as to prevent shorting the system, etc...) - i can't believe that out of all the comments so far, no one is screaming bloody murder about the tinsey-weensy little detail that the fscking cable kept coming undone - and how insanely stupid that is.

    Its written off as "a prototype problem" - i say that Tom's Hardware has done a lousy job of highlighing this and has done a disservice in not making it a major issue.

    of course - this is a PC review site - and Tom's is probably used to things crashing and just not working all the time.
    • "Apple, when designing the Firewire physical port looked into what it would take to build a rugged, tough, port that would accept the rigors of being connected and unconnected repeatedly."

      Which makes sense. ATA (in any form), however, is not intended to be connected and unconnected repeatedly. Anyone who has ever bent the pins on a drive, or pulled the IDC right off the ribbon, can tell you it has been this way from day one. ATA is supposed to live inside the computer and be touched only rarely.

      That being said, from what I've read, the new Serial ATA cables are likely to stand up to abuse better than the ribbons we have now. The connectors are smaller (= less friction = less mechanical stress), and there are no pins -- only edge contacts. But it still is not designed for abuse. Don't do that, then.

      "...the fscking cable kept coming undone... written off as 'a prototype problem'..."

      Dude, have you ever seen prototype hardware before? That sort of thing is normal. I've seen prototype systems with so many ECO wires that the cover wouldn't close. I've seen boards with parts missing. You cannot base anything on the quality of this sort of stuff. It is the hardware equivalent of a "beta" or "development" release.

      As for coverage, Tom devoted a whole page to it -- what more do you want?

  • Now I haven't always been the safest person when working on my computer, but is poking around inside your machine when it's still turned on a good idea? Everything I've heard is that yer just playing with fire... er electricity when ya screw with a box when it's still turned on.

    I wouldn't want people fucking things up in their boxes because their drive manufacture told them it's ok to mess with it while it's turned on.

    • "...is poking around inside your machine when it's still turned on a good idea?"

      Hot-swap is like nuclear power: It can be used for good or evil. ;-) (With apologies to Scott Adams.)

      Seriously, hot-swap is probably not something you want to give to the average luser. I tell some of people to shutdown their computers before swapping anything (USB, PCMCIA, etc.) just because it is easier for them to understand.

      In a server situation, though, hot-swap is often a requirement. Redundant disks really want to go along with hot-swap. Even the ability to expand storage while online is useful. High-end servers these days have hot-swap PCI; hot-swap disks are expected as a matter of course.
  • Functionally, FireWire and USB2 are probably as good or better than this. But the fact that Serial ATA is backwards compatible in many ways really matters much of the chip and controller design can probably be carried over, and it may turn out that even older BIOSes and operating system can use the new standard transparently if you plug in a new interface card.

    For FireWire and USB, in contrast, there is just a lot more to configure and a lot more driver support needed, and it's still hard to boot from them.

  • I know there will be Old Drive -> New Bus adapters, but will I be able to get something for the other way?
    For example, if the drive dies in my only SATA machine, am I screwed, or will I be able to use an adapter for PATA?

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