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Hardware

First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive 143

Posted by CmdrTaco from the someday-this'll-be-commonplace dept.
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. "
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First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive More

First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive

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  • What is taking so long? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by supraxnet ( 567080 ) * on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:53AM (#8830228) Homepage
    It has been a long time now without any major advancements in "easy" removable storage. Why has there not been a cheap and easily removable/transportable storage device with storage capacities that match the times on the market yet? There is a huge demand for something larger then 4 or 8 gigabytes, and the current optical storage we have now has been shown to be short lived [slashdot.org].

    • Re:What is taking so long? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aldoman ( 670791 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:03AM (#8830270) Homepage
      Because of the enviroment. People don't scratch hard drives and expect them to work. However, you will be ridiculed as a conman if a few scratches hurt your optical media.

      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)

      by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:24AM (#8830347) Homepage
      What huge demand?

      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.
      • Or maybe pick up a cheap DLT drive on ebay.

        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)

          by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:45PM (#8830810) Homepage
          Another usable solution. But the speed and price of DVD-R now ($150 for the drive, $1.5 for the media) , it's cheaper to use DVD-R and get a nice sleeve, and back up much faster, than tape.

          AFAIK, tape still runs at $1/gb, while DVD-R is now $0.20/gb
          • Forgeting the cost of drives (they are insignificant to the TCO on a datacenter backup solution) I can get Ultrim 2 tapes for about 60 bucks a pop for 200 gigs uncompressed with a streaming write speed of 30MB a sec or 100 GB an hour compared to 4gb in 8-10 minutes for an 8x DVD-R or 24 - 30GB and hour. The DVD's do get me random access and a sligtly cheaper media except for the volume (it's a 50 DVD Hatbox to store the same as one tape) I would say tape wins for a datacenter and optical at a normal 1-3PC
          • (ones that I know off-hand) AIT-2 (50Gb uncompressed) - $60/tape, $1000/drive AIT-3 (100Gb uncompressed) - $60/tape, $3500/drive Yeah, tape prices suck for the home, mostly because the drives with decent per-gigabyte tape prices are expensive.
    • I've got some 18 year old 8mm tapes that I was planning to convert to DVDs later this year, but the possibility of my discs failing has me quite worried. Unfortunatly, magnetic tapes don't usually last more then 25 years, so I'm forced to do something about it. I'd really like to get them off analog media and onto something that doesn't degrade. Its a shame that I'm going to have to worry about my discs falling apart much sooner then the 18 years these tapes lasted.
      • Convert them, and keep the 8mm tapes in a cool, dark, dry place.

        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)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:35PM (#8830736) Homepage
      They've been working on making 1,8" SATA drives the next big thing in removable storage now for a looong time. The problem is not technical - SATA drives are hot-swap and trivial to create a mechanical enclosure for (something like floppies and zip-disks simply protecting the connectors from dust etc.)

      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)

        by ph4s3 ( 634087 )
        I think you're fooling yourself. All you tin-foil hat types like to think that the world's coporations are conspiring against you.

        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)

    by Allen Zadr ( 767458 ) * <Allen.Zadr@nOspaM.gmail.com> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @10:57AM (#8830248) Journal
    I found the most interesting part (the second half of the article) was that SiiG has "no interest in supporting optical drives", when the reviewer was having problems using this drive with a SiiG controller.

    I guess I can now confirm that I have no interest in buying anything from SiiG.

    • Re:Compatability Issues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkBlackFox ( 643814 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:08AM (#8830287)
      For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

      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.
      • Er.. that should read "but I don't know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method..."

        It's easter, and I just woke up...

      • Re:Compatability Issues (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Allen Zadr ( 767458 ) * <Allen.Zadr@nOspaM.gmail.com> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:18AM (#8830332) Journal
        Well when you have two devices on the same bus, both competing for bandwidth, it's possible to run into the dreaded, buffer underrun. SATA, IIRC, doesn't have this problem.

        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)

        by Hektor_Troy ( 262592 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:28AM (#8830365)
        One word: Wirering.

        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)

          by pknoll ( 215959 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:39AM (#8830425)
          Last I checked, rounded IDE cables were still half the price of SATA cables. Since they're available, arguing for SATA because of its cable design is rather a moot point.

          • Re:Compatability Issues (Score:5, Insightful)

            by moreati ( 119629 ) <alex@moreati.org.uk> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:59AM (#8830527) Homepage
            Rounded IDE is a hack. the length of the cable is even more limited than normal because of increased cross talk (interference between signal wires). Also, in my experieince, the rounded cables are even less flexible than the ribbons.

            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.
          • Perhaps cable wiring isn't a good example, but motherboard wiring sure is. Routing 4-6 leads is much nicer than the 40 required for the p-ata spec. S-ATA connectors don't have exposed pins that can get bent or broken, and doesn't have the cable at a right angle to the connector allowing closer spacing.
        • One word: Wirering.

          One more word: spelling.
          Sorry... couldn't resist.
        • PATA cables do suck but they are nowhere near 4 inches wide. Even a 50 conductor narrow SCSI cable is less than four inches. (In fact it looks to be about three inches or less - for reference, a US Quarter Dollar is about 15/16" wide.)

          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:3, Informative)

          by ajs318 ( 655362 )
          Serial ATA connectors are horribly flimsy, since the "socket" goes into the "plug". I know because I recently ordered and commissioned a beautiful dual Xeon 2.8GHz server with two serial ATA drives. To get Linux onto it, I had to add an old-style parallel ATA drive just temporarily. When unplugging the extra drive, I accidentally snapped off the Serial ATA connector on one of the hot swap bays, and had to order a replacement connector PCB. At least it was a connector PCB and not the drive itself :-\
        • A-ATA cables are about 3/8 to 1/2 of an inch wide and about 1/8th thick. you can twist the round and round without losing much length, and they do 90 degree turns easily. I got a new computer back in october with SATA, this is how I know. And the regular length S-ATA DATA cables are about half that of the P-ATA cables. Only thing is they need a power adapter in most computers since the plugs are different. Best thing about the ATA cables? Impossible to put them in backwards. I still have the problem

      • Re:Compatability Issues (Score:3, Informative)

        by CatOne ( 655161 )
        True, the bus speed increase isn't going to improve performance.

        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)

          by knewman_1971 ( 549573 ) <{kris.newman} {at} {khaosx.com}> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:16PM (#8830620)
          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.

          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.
        • Why spend the money on a new drive (since we all know new technology always costs an arm, a leg, and your first born), when old you can adapt [newegg.com].

          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.

        • 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)

          • What's the date on your XP CD? I have an "original" one -- From November/December 2001. Perhaps you have a newer CD?

            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.
        • 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.

          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
        • "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."

          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

      • 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

      • It might be nice to get rid of your old school P-ATA connections entirely when you buy a new motherboard. Not necessary of course, but I wouldn't mind, especially if it cost me less..

        Just a thought.
      • 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.

        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.
      • For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

        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
        • Or maybe it's a marketing issue. "The geeks all seem satisfied with the hardware they presently have. How can we convince them they need to spend lots of money on an expensive first generation of something new?"
        • Well, don't forget that you might have two drives on that ATA chain, both of which have buffers so you don't have to sit on the ATA channel for the entire write cycle. I think it will be very difficult to fully saturate an ATA-100 or ATA-133 controller, but you can probably burst more than ATA-66 can handle.

          Of course with all of the caveats you get with ATA, I doubt you'll see any performance improvement either way. Oh well.
      • For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

        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
      • For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

        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
    • You should never had had any interest in buying anything from SiiG in the first place. Their drivers are abysmal, their documents are in engrish and frankly their hardware is craptacular to begin with. Avoid SiiG at all costs. I lost a 150GB stripe due to a driver error.
    • As with all new technologies, I usually try to wait for the tech to mature a little. Sometimes it's hard to resist getting some of the cool bleeding-edge products, but I like to wait until they are cheaper and more robust. I'm ready to go SATA, but I'd like to get harddrives an doptical drives with the native SATA instead of having to get an adapter.

      --
      Retail Retreat [retailretreat.com]
  • mirror please?

  • Ah well, ah well... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:04AM (#8830272) Homepage
    there have been no signs of S-ATA CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD+R drives.

    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)

    by kraemer ( 637938 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:04AM (#8830275)
    Poster didnt bother to look around. Plextor has some SATA DVD+RW love in the pipe:
    http://www.plextor.com/english/products/712 SA.htm

    • Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW (Score:5, Informative)

      by Allen Zadr ( 767458 ) * <Allen.Zadr@nOspaM.gmail.com> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:11AM (#8830298) Journal
      Your link [plextor.com] is quite usefull

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Is this a natively S-ATA drive or is it like the early SATA hard drives where they use a converter chip to glue on a SATA connector to a PATA drive? This hack merely results in increased latency and none of the hypothetical benefits of SATA down the line.

        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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Plextor drive has not yet been released so it's not actual on the market.

  • A solution?? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dFaust ( 546790 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:07AM (#8830283)
    S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives.

    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)

      by Allen Zadr ( 767458 ) * <Allen.Zadr@nOspaM.gmail.com> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:14AM (#8830316) Journal
      When both drives on a single bus are active, there are sometimes bandwidth issues that can lead to the hated buffer-underrun.

      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)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 )
        if your drives have "burn-proof" you dont worry about that.

        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 ... 4 52X burners that can burn 4 discs at once without even a fart. SCSI is the source hard drives, andthe machine is pretty unuseable when the 4 disk burn is goin

        • Re:A solution?? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by bhtooefr ( 649901 ) <[gro.rfeoothb] [ta] [rfeoothb]> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:33PM (#8830717) Homepage Journal
          My KHyperMedia 52x24x52x has "Seamless Link" or something like that, and while it was $39, the next week OfficeMax had it free after rebate.

          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...
      • Ok, two points here.

        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.
        • Yes, that's the fifth rule of hardware -- because of the limitations of IDE. SCSI has NEVER had that limitation, and SATA will not have that limitation either.
      • Although I fully admit- starting MS Word

        That's awesome! Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery! :)

  • Why not Firewire? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OG ( 15008 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:09AM (#8830292)
    I understand that something needs to replace ATAPI. It's done it's job well, but there are better technologies. But why wait for SATA when it seems there are already options available? If BIOS manufacturers would all allow booting from a Firewire device (do any currently) and MBs would all put Firewire onboard, it seems that things would be set. It allows for easy daischaining out of the box, it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does, and it's really fast. I didn't appreciate just how fast until I downloaded my music collection to my iPod. So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue? If so, what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?

    • Re:Why not Firewire? (Score:3, Informative)

      by CatOne ( 655161 )
      PATA and SATA are generally used inside the computer, USB/USB2 and Firewire are generally used externally (i.e. cable connected).

      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).
      • True, but how many single, non-scsi drives do you have that can constantly transfer over 400Mbits per second?

        The drive manufacturers keep looking for a faster interface, but they haven't improved their real-world transfer speeds much since Ultra 66.

        • The WD Raptor and Maxtor MaxLine II can both transfer faster than 50MB/sec, sustained. See storagereview.com
          • The WD Raptor and Maxtor MaxLine II can both transfer faster than 50MB/sec, sustained. See storagereview.com

            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.

      • PATA and SATA are generally used inside the computer, USB/USB2 and Firewire are generally used externally (i.e. cable connected).

        Not sure of all the details/exactly why

        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)

      by slittle ( 4150 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:56AM (#8830507) Homepage
      and it's really fast.
      Unless FW1600 is out yet, SATA is faster. Firewire is 400, 800 and 1600Mb/s (afaik). SATA is 150MB/s, with 300MB/s due out mid-2004, and 600MB/s in 2007.

      it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does
      SATA is a port, not a bus. You get one device per port, period. No more master/slave bullshit.
      • Unfortunately, the one point rather defeats the other. When was the last time you used a single device that could transfer more than 400Mb/s? What about 800Mb/s? 800Mb/s, it's as fast as ATA100. When was the last time you saturated an ATA100 channel (it doesn't count if it was saturated by the controller not being able to interleave messages to different devices properly, resulting in one being starved, only if the drive could produce data faster than the channel could consume it). If SATA supported mu
    • >> Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller? I have one 250GB USB2-disk connected to my Centrino laptop, and whenever I use the disk, CPU-load increases to 30-50%. Is Firewire better?

      • Firewire is ALWAYS better than USB2.0 for CPU (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The nature of Firewire is that it's not host-dependent like USB2.0 is. It's really a point-to-point daisy chained interface. You'll be much better off using Firewire in any situation for CPU utilization.
    • Wow, I thought I was the only one around here that was advocating firewire drives.

      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)

    by 9812713 ( 641418 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:11AM (#8830296)
    I think that dispite the fact that many manufactures can not decide where technology is going, they should be making the standard.

    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.

    • 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.

      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.

  • Computer Builders may soon rejoice! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:11AM (#8830300)
    I think SATA-based optical drives will be a huge boon to people who build their own PCs, especially those who use AMD processors and/or overclock various elements of their systems.

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.

      Only SATA 2.0 will solve this problem, but it's still a couple of years away.
      • I don't think anyone who builds their own computer puts more than one device per PATA channel if they can help it. It's just not worth sharing bandwidth between devices.
        • Except with optical drives on modern controllers, sharing the channel hardly matters. I always shared the second channel before I moved to SATA/SCSI disks and realized I had a PATA channel doing nothing.
          • Except with optical drives on modern controllers, sharing the channel hardly matters.

            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.
        • I beg to differ. Assuming a standard motherboard, with 2 PATA channels, and assuming a minimum of one HDD and one optical storage device as standard on a PC, any upgrades to the PC means that the channel will be shared.

          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)

        by Ironica ( 124657 ) <pixel@bo o n d o c k.org> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @12:37PM (#8830759) Journal
        SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.

        And two SATA cables are still much nicer than one IDE cable...
    • That's funny. I setup a new machine on an Intel D865PERLX motherboard w/ an 80gb Seagate S-ATA drive, loaded XP Pro SP1a onto it, and it had no problem seeing the drive.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by frumin ( 696489 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:13AM (#8830302) Homepage Journal
    Text from the article:
    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)

      by base_chakra ( 230686 )
      So the conclusion for all this is that in the near future, do not expect SATA controllers to support any optical drives, except the chipset-based controllers, and then only the Intel chip has been confirmed to work.

      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)

    by archonit.net ( 762880 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:26AM (#8830354)
    Ease up on their servers ;)

    Shows all the pictures as well as text

    cdfreaks [cdfreaks.com]

  • Standard drawers. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by deragon ( 112986 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @11:32AM (#8830381) Homepage Journal
    A bit off topic, but I wish that the industry could settle on standard drawers for Hard Drives. Now that we have hot plugable hard drives with SATA, what we need is a standard drawer so one can take the drive and stick it in someone's else computer.

    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)

      by 2nd Post! ( 213333 )
      Hehe, why not use a solution that works, instead of wishing for a solution that doesn't exist?

      Firewire hard drives are:

      Mechanically compatible
      Hot pluggable
      Battery powered
      Bus powered
      Portable
      Small

      • Re:Standard drawers. (Score:2, Informative)

        by Omega996 ( 106762 )
        Because people compare published theoretical specifications like they actually mean something.

        "Oh, look! SATA supports 150MB per second on each channel - Firewire is only 50MB. Drives on SATA must be faster!!"

        Fucking retards. Ah, well...
      • Is there any standard drawer for Firewire drives? I never heard of that and I bet not. You are offtopic. I am talking about docking the drive within your casing. Not have a bunch of external drives and extra power cords.
        • Bus powered means no extra power cords.

          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!

  • Except for the physical limitations of the medium. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by httpamphibio.us ( 579491 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:34PM (#8831175)
    S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. Did we forget that CDs tend to explode when spun up faster than 56x [powerlabs.org]? That seems like a bigger problem than not having enough bandwidth to transfer data...

  • S-ATA ? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lightman_73 ( 183090 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:42PM (#8831250)
    I wonder how much time will it takes for someone to come up with a S+ATA interface. ;)
  • I need a SCSI DVD+-RW drive. prefereably Ultra2scsi.

    I have a plethora of SunGear yet all I can find out there are IDE or FireWire.

    Why are there no SCSI drives?
  • Why have I been waiting? Because right now I have 2 IDE channels in my computer, and one SATA. I have channel one on the IDE controller used for my hard drive. I have a zip drive (ide) and 2 cdrom drives. The zip and cdrom drives operate at a max ata33. So, if I were to put a cdrom or zip on my primary controller with the hard drive... that slows the transfer rate for my drive from 133 to 33... right? If so, that's unacceptable. So, I currently don't use the zip drive. If they made ATA-133 or SATA-15

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