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Data Storage Portables Hardware

Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned 105

Posted by CowboyNeal from the sata-to-go dept.
Lord_Slepnir writes "Cnet is reporting on a consortium of companies that wish to develop a Serial ATA hard drive interface for Miniature hard drives called CE-ATA. The goal of these new drives would be to cut power consumption and use smaller connectors, not to provide an increase in speed. 'The purpose is to design a new interface tailored to the consumer electronics and handheld gadget segment,' said Intel's principal engineer for CE-ATA, Knut Grimsrud. The consortium consists of Intel, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor, Seagate Technology, and Toshiba America Information Systems."
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Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned More

Serial ATA for Mini Hard Drives Planned

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  • Going Too Far? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Paster Of Muppets ( 787158 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:39AM (#10220379)
    Surely there's a limit as to how small you want everything? WIth mobile phones now being credit card sized [pcmag.com], isn't there a limit when it's too expensive and time-consuming to make already-small things even smaller for the expected returns? Or is it just a case of "mine is smaller than yours!"?

    • Re:Going Too Far? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:41AM (#10220386) Homepage Journal
      You will never catch me saying, "Mine is smaller then yours."
      • "THAN", try this "THEN"...

        Where? In Mother Russia, Cossix, ahem, COSSACKS call YOU...

        You will NEVER catch me using a suppository phone, but you might catch SOME people who have to smuggle a phone into a country somewhere (maybe into North Korea to do an "expose" on hunger, and so forth).

        Would this redefine "'colo' cation"?. Would this constitute dirty digital communication?

        I can see it now: "Makers of Fly-Eating Robot Offer Corneal Shine Job, Bionic Optical Implants, and Fecal-Powered Power Supply".

        "ET
      • You don't have to SAY it, we already KNOW.
    • Serial ATA for smaller cable connections?

      Sounds like USB to me.

      I've just had one class in what should be called electronics 101... but from what I understand on the first day is as things like clock cycles (Hz, MHz, GHz) get higher the distances the signals travel get smaller. Therefore, smaller devices are the result of increased "cpu speed".

      Actually, some clarity would be nice. It didn't make much sense yesterday either.

  • Did I miss something? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ghoser777 ( 113623 ) <fahrenba@ma c . com> on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:40AM (#10220384) Homepage
    What, no reference to uses with the iPod?

    Matt Fahrenbacher

    • Re:Did I miss something? (Score:2, Informative)

      by ikea5 ( 608732 )
      Yes you missed FTA:a new drive interface for miniature hard drives. Such drives are often used to store data in handheld consumer electronics, including devices such as Apple Computer's iPod music player.
      • Dude, I just realized something.

        You've all probably heard of the phenomenon where a Linux user, trying to learn how to do a certain task, will go into a Linux forum posing as a Windows user and complain about how impossible to do said task in Linux; the Linux zealots who inhabit the forum will fall over themselves to show how 'easy' it really is. If the Linux user had asked straight up "How do I do this," he would have been labelled a n00b and summarily ignored.

        What we have here, in this thread, is someth

  • Isn't SATA small enough? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:50AM (#10220412)
    Why not just use the present SATA connector? It's already small enough for a credit card hdd. I'd guess maybe the strange SATA power connector is a bit big but that never stopped anyone. How many SATA drives used molex connectors instead? So no big deal! I don't see why we need yet another standard; it's bad enough to see SATA2 and SAS coming down the pipe already. (Let SCSI die the death it deserves! It never ceases to amaze me how such a simple protocol became such a monstrously complex one over the years.)

    At the end of the day the hdd size and power usage is limited more by the drive itself than the dang connector!

    • Re:Isn't SATA small enough? (Score:5, Informative)

      by PaintyThePirate ( 682047 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:03AM (#10220457) Homepage
      I assume that by "use smaller connectors", they meant that SATA is smaller than the connectors currently being used in mini hard drives. While power usage may be limited more by the drive itself, size may not be. Take a look at the currect standard for 1 inch hard drives. It needs 52 pins on it. SATA in contrast, only needs 8, plus whatever is needed for power.

      • Re:Isn't SATA small enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by base_chakra ( 230686 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:15AM (#10220483)
        I assume that by "use smaller connectors", they meant that SATA is smaller than the connectors currently being used in mini hard drives.

        I interpreted it differently. The article is about supporting miniature hard drives in consumer electronics devices. For that purpose, even SATA's connectors, small as they are, are rather large when you're trying to fit everything into a palm-sized device.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Thats good and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viceice ( 462967 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:52AM (#10220420)
    But what about designing laptop HDD's that can keep up with desktop HDDs?

    Nowadays, one can buy a desktop replacment laptop that has got everything, Desktop processor, upwars of a gig of ram, DVD-RW the works. Yet, the HDD is as slow as molasses in febuary.

    • I don't know about that, my laptop uses a 7200rpm drive. (and a 5400rpm for it's secondary).
    • More power for the HD, or more power for the CPU. The hard constraints on a laptop, more than anything else, is power consumption and heat dissapation. If your hard drive is sucking down 9W to spin at 10krpm, vs 5.5W at 7200, 5.0W at 5400, and 4.5W at 4200, then you'll need to significantly upgrade your cooling system, or sacrifice 4W from the CPU or GPU.

      Or accept an EVEN bigger desktop replacement.

  • Typo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr2cents ( 323101 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:54AM (#10220427)
    that should be SE-ATA, CE-ATA refers to cerial-ATA, an effort to make harddisks out of old bread crumbs..

  • Linux support for Serial ATA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jsrodrigues ( 212119 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @08:55AM (#10220434)
    It would be a good point to note that only the more recent releases of the Linux kernel suport Serial ATA.
    I recently assembled a PC with a IBM-Hitachi Deskstar SATA hard drive and Redhat 9 would not recognize it. I then downloaded SUSE Personal edition 9.1 and I had no problems installing SUSE Linux. However, I need a Linux distro with more bundled software than what the SUSE personal edition provides. As I post this note, I'm downloading Fedora Core-2. I hope that Fedora Core-2 recognizes my SATA drive.
    I found very little information regarding Linux SATA support on the web. I also posted some questions to comp.os.linux.redhat and got no replies.
    It would be nice to know which sites offer up information on Linux SATA support and more important which distros support SATA "out of the box".

    • Re:Linux support for Serial ATA (Score:5, Informative)

      by taylortbb ( 759869 ) <taylor.byrnes@gD ... om minus painter> on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:19AM (#10220493) Homepage
      Any distro based on the 2.6 kernel series will support SATA (Mandrake 10 (my reccomendation), SuSE 9.1, Fedora Core 2, etc.). I wonder if this will make it harder for people to port Linux to mini devices, it took a while just for normal SATA support in the kernel.
      • If they had any sense, this new standard would only be physically different from SATA so that the drivers wouldn't need any changing, but it looks like that's not the case : (
        • No, they're driven by marketing.

          A 2.5" laptop hard drive currently costs 3-5 times the cost of a 3.5" drive (and they're typically a lot smaller - I've had to settle for 80GB as I couldn't find anything bigger).

          Making SATA and CE-SATA the same logical format would allow us to stick cheap drives on our laptops (maybe on a little addon box).. there's no way they're going to allow that.
          • Huh? I figured all this would do is make 2.5", 1.8", and maybe Microdrives have the same kind of connector. How would that let us put something cheaper in our laptops?

            After all, the reason a 3.5" drive won't fit in a laptop isn't due just to the interface...

    • Re:Linux support for Serial ATA (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nachtfalke ( 160 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:28AM (#10220516) Homepage
      I have a box running Fedora Core 2 and a Silicon Image 3114 based S-ATA controller, works like a charm, no extra drivers necessary.
      And I found http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html [linuxmafia.com] to be a very interesting read, helped me decide on the Dawicontrol DC-154 controller.
    • It would be a good point to note that only the more recent releases of the Linux kernel suport Serial ATA.

      It would also be a good point to note that SATA itself is a recent standard. Drives have only started showing up in the last year or so.
      For Linux-SATA info, a quick Google turned up the Serial ATA chipsets -- Linux support status [linuxmafia.com] page.

    • I don't understand. When SATA was first announced as a competitor to Firewire, all the anything-but-apple proponents said the reason it was so wonderful and necessary was that it would be completely compatible with ATA, no need for new drivers, isn't that wonderful. The SATA standard [sata-io.org] itself says that a SATA card must emulate an ATA device (master only, optionally emulate master/slave). So how can it be that these devices don't just work right out of the box, with full support for SATA required for higher

  • Step in the right direction. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jacek Poplawski ( 223457 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:04AM (#10220459)
    Face it - PC is huge, noisy and heavy.

    Compare PC with DVD player, digital camera or palmtop. Why the hell everything can be small, silent and light, and PC just can't?

    Smaller mainboard?
    Fanless CPU?
    Micro hard drive?
    Pendrive instead box of floppies?

    Let's just hope... Because currently I have just pendrive. And I would pay for small mainboard with fanless cpu, just give me system with speed like now (Athlon XP 1800) and do not set price 3x higher.

    I know that I can buy VIA C3, but it is too slow for me. Can I buy Transmeta CPU for PC?

    • Re:Step in the right direction. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chrispl ( 189217 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:33AM (#10220535) Homepage
      I have a Shuttle XPC SN85G4V2 [shuttle.com] with an Athlon64 processor and a nice fast SATA drive. The designers dropped the floppy drive for memory card readers, which so far has worked just fine for me. Its small (comes with a handy carrying bag!), very quiet and powerful. Runs 64-bit Suse 9.1 perfectly and I can switch over and play Doom3 in high res.

      The only complaint I have is that the internal (USB) wifi card is not working under linux. A good PCI adapter remedied that but took up the only PCI slot.

    • Why the hell everything can be small, silent and light, and PC just can't?

      You answered your own question later - "I know that I can buy VIA C3, but it is too slow for me," and "just give me system with speed like now (Athlon XP 1800) and do not set price 3x higher." Fast CPUs generate more heat.

      Engineers have a saying. Fast, reliable, cheap: pick any two.

      Ever try to expand or upgrade your DVD player or palmtop? Do you like fast, high capacity storage? Do you play 3D games?

      If you don't need those thi

      • Pendrive is example of something better than floppies - more powerfull, faster, easier to handle. And cheaper if you calculate price/capacity factor.

        And I disagree about CDRW. You can use floppy in every PC, you can't use CDRW in every PC, because most have not CD-writer installed. Pendrive requires only USB port - which is in every PC. And it is not just theory - before I bought pendrive I was using floppies - not CDRW.

        Noisy computer should be used when high power is needed. Noisy computer should not be
        • Just a minor pedantic correction:

          Most CD-ROM drives past 2x can read CD-RW perfectly. Besides, why not just use CD-R? I rarely (if ever these days) have problems with CD-R's being read by any type of device. (Video game systems, CD-ROM's, DVD's, audio players, etc)

          ...and judging from my own experiences, computers were equipped (standard) with CD-ROM's long before USB became standard, let alone ubiquitous.

          I hate floppies myself...I also hate moving parts. USB key-chain type drives are quite allur
        • As noted elsewhere... USB pen drives aren't quite cheap enough that you're willing to give them away. Maybe once the 128MB size drops below $5 and the 32MB cards are under $2. Other then that, they're much better the floppies were (but more akin to zip disks where you kept a jealous eye on your media).

          Personally, I want a DVD-R type media in a hard plastic shell, about the size of the old 3.5" disks. But I think we're stuck with CD-style optical media for another decade.
    • done!

      http://www.apple.com/imac/

      25db

      Starting at just $1,299. :)

  • Uh, hello? Is anybody out there? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by marcus ( 1916 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:10AM (#10220471) Journal
    Who has heard of USB 2?
    Firewire?

    Both are plenty fast.
    Both have small connectors.
    Both have power over the link.
    Both are already supported just about everywhere.

    • Who has heard of USB 2?
      Firewire?

      Both are plenty fast.
      Both have small connectors.

      Those bus types would have to be bridged to ATA anyway, so their presence would be superfluous.

      What's more, the CE-SATA standard isn't just about power reduction and connector size, but customizing SATA drives for the unique needs of personal multimedia players. From the article: "The proposed specification could reduce drives' emphasis on correcting errors, which matters much more for banking applications than for serving u
      • Both points are irrelevant when considering consumer goods where low cost and narrow margins rule. Any customization of the drives and interfaces will increase costs unless said customizations would lead to increased volume in sales.

        Since there is nothing to be gained by dropping error correction, and it will reduce the versatility of the drives, it will only cost more. There is no performance requirement that cannot be met by current drives so any changes will only add to costs without providing any tr
        • The interfaces that exist are already standardized, already in silicon, the required bridges already exist, and the consumer already has an installed base of compatible gear. So, any current hardware will have an advantage over any new stuff that will arguably have fewer features and less flexibility than that which is currently available and it will cost more.

          The issue here is not the connection to the PC. You can still use USB/Firewire/etc.

          This technology is black box to the end user. Unless you l

      • What's more, the CE-SATA standard isn't just about power reduction and connector size, but customizing SATA drives for the unique needs of personal multimedia players. From the article: "The proposed specification could reduce drives' emphasis on correcting errors, which matters much more for banking applications than for serving up video pixels...".

        I wanna know what they're smoking if they think that media drives don't need error correcting capabilities. People already complain about CDs getting scratc
        • I wanna know what they're smoking if they think that media drives don't need error correcting capabilities.

          I think it's safe to assume that they're only talking about read errors, not write errors. Also, the extent is a deemphasis on error correction, not an elimination of it. The point is that playing audio or video streams is a comparatively fault-tolerant, non-mission critical, task.

          Contrary to the baseless assumptions by the previous reply from 'marcus', I'm sure that the SATA-IO engineers have enoug
    • But what is on the other end of that link?

      A large IDE connector on a USB/Firewire interface board connected to the large IDE connector on the storage metium.

      They are great for communications between devices. They are also great for internal device mounting. Embedded and notebook platforms have already began to ditch internal COM (serial) devices and replace them with an on board USB2.0 bus(which rocks and makes service easier). A lot of platforms are also even replacing former PCI and Mini PCI devices

      • Ditch the Bridge Board (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Detritus ( 11846 )
        Many SCSI drives used to be ST-506 or ESDI drives with an attached SCSI bridge board. As SCSI matured, drives were designed with native SCSI interfaces.

        The same thing could happen with USB or FireWire. The drive manufacturer just needs to design some new silicon.

        • EDSI and SCSI are both drive control protocols.

          Yes we could create a drive with USB on the controller, that USB would still have to interface to a controller (even if it is on-die)

          USB is simply a comm protocol, granted a relatively intelligent and flexible one, but in it's core it is still just a way to get data from device A to device B. It is designed for a different abstraction layer than the drive controller.

          Adding Drive control to the protocol will Bloat the spec and possibly render it too complica

    • Yeah, I have an external firewire drive. One end connects to a pcmcia card in my laptop, the other connects to this large enclosure. Inside that, the hard drive connects up to an EIDE to Firewire board. Just because the connector is small doesn't mean the overhead to get it there is.

      I think you're mistaking the problem they're trying to solve here, the overhead.
  • Now I will be able to listen to the songs on my Rev.E iPod at triple-speed !

    Although I suppose if Apple ever delivers the promised feature of having your Mac OSX Home directory on an iPod, this will be a very useful feature. (Apparently this was ditched as current iPod hard drives can't hack the stress of continuous desktop-style drive access)

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:29AM (#10220521)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Probably has something to do with electrical interference. I know most mobos power 12v fans via onboard headers, but the power requirements for a HD might be too much for the small traces on PCBs.

    • Re:Power at the connector!!! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @10:17AM (#10220711)
      SATA *does* specify a standard for a power connector and location (most still have the standard ATX power connector). You could feed it through the same cable through the motherboard in theory, though that would increase the power draw of the drive controller significantly. This is mainly for the possibility sane backplanes (including longer ground pins than other pins for hot-swap capability.)

      • Also, the part about the motherboard being able to unplug the controllers is pointless, and dangerous, unless coordinated via the command channel anyway.

        Being able to send a 'turn yourself off' command is nearly as low power as actually unplugging it (for example, do you have to unplug/remove batteries of most of your electronics when not using them, or can you just hit the power button to have themselves turn on, and do those electronics have significant power draw in their standby state?).
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Right that it isn't the same connector as the data, it is adjacent and a bit larger, and yes, the connection cycles are reduced in comparison with the typical SCSI hot swap connector. For the sake of short term compatibility, I still have to lean toward having the power connector optional between ATX and the adjacent connector for a transitional time.

          As far as controller draw, I was mostly referring to controller cards more, which have to pull power from the PCI slots and as such have to be mindful of the
  • Why another drive interface when the ones in the iPod mini and Samsung's new SPH-V5400 phone seem adequate? Here's a clue: the new interface is meant to "address the major concerns of consumer electronics manufacturers", which I read as "DRM".

    It'll be interesting to see what's in the interface spec.

    • See my post above "Uh, hello? Is anybody out there?" about loss of performance, increased costs and no ofsetting gains.
    • I think the killer app for the phone-drive might be locally stored voicemails.

      I'd *love* to have several greetings recorded, and be able to select them as I see fit. "In Class", "At Work", "Busy", "Generic", "Forward to Carrier Voicemail" sorta thing.

      While the phone was in-range of a tower or whatever, it handles its own voicemail, recording, etc. When it leaves range or turns off, you get your provider's voicemail.
      • I think the killer app for the phone-drive might be locally stored voicemails.

        That sounds like it has potential. Or a library of your own MP3s for ringtones, which is what started me thinking about the DRM aspect.

        But imagine this: you have all of your important voicemail, as well as recordings you've made as reminders or notes on important topics. Maybe a video of your kid's 2nd birthday, stuff that really means something to you. And your service provider absolutely sucks . So you switch providers, bu

  • IMHO these are all dying technologies. I think all the major corporations should be focusing on USB RAM drives. This IS going to be the drive of the future, its just a matter of time before the price points make it so its affordable.
  • I really hate that name and I think that they are thinking that the CE name [microsoft.com] is synonymous with portable. The name has nothing about serial in it!
  • I suggested this to the SATA forum a few months back, I wonder when they started working on it. The crux of the problem is this:

    Existing flash memory formats aren't fast enough, small enough, or standard enough. CF is fast and standard but the connector is bulky. XD is fast and small but nobody has XD slots on their desktop. SD is small but not too fast or standard. And of course the 44-pin laptop hard drive connector is downright huge compared to modern pocket devices. The advantage of all these memory fo

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