Thoughts on Serial ATA
 

What are peoples thoughts on this? A step in the right direction or yet another competing standard?
The poll is about the basic Serial ATA only. Posts about the derivatives (Serial ATA 2 and Serial ATA SCSI) are of course welcome.

www.serialata.org

Edward

it's a good thing for sure, but it needs too actually come out....

it seemed like a good solution to the 160 gig max limitation for our current ATA

if anyone is needing more space they are making new motherboards with onboard raid
take a look at the new abit max series.
i was also talking to an oem dealer and he said that is what they were doing too.


i think serial ATA has a future, but give atleast a year till we can touch it, and maybe a little longer till its a reality.

till then, its raid!! =)

what do you guys think of the new abit max series??? i want one sooo bad

ata-100 is 137gb, ata-133 is some huge number, serial ata is about the same. The major advantage of serial ata is the cable size, transfer speeds, and multiple devices

I personally think it'll be a Good Thing but not for the transfer speeds. We can't fully utilize ATA100 and ATA133 is a decided gimmik speedwize. I don't see the equivalent to ATA150-166 being too necessary for some time.

Edward

We can't use the speeds of parallel ATA because it's parallel. It's alot more effort for the computer to time the signals to have them run down the cable in perfect parallel, vs a serial connection, where they can just stream down one after the other.

Not only that, but Serial ATA will have adapter dongles, that you will be able to put your Parallel ATA drives in Serial chains.

It will be a GREAT thing, once it comes out. I would be all about it coming out now... but I don't have the upgrade cash, so I really don't care :D

That's not it at all... we can't use the speed of ATA66+ (unless you run raid, ofcourse) becuase the fastest ATA hardrive can only physically sustain around 40mb/sec.

I'm not talking about single drives, I'm talking about running 3 or 4 drives on one cable and having them all running at once will definately be more than 100mb/sec

This is the best article I've been able to find on Serial ATA.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1174

That is still not an issue with ata 100+, the main advantage of serial ata is the fact that they don't SHARE the bandwidth, (alert readers will quickly understand the fact that this solves a problem that does not occur with parallel ata, since parallel ata only allows 2 drives per channel anyway) so that no matter the amount of drives you have, they all get the full speed.

And on the more physical side of things, it allows us to get rid of the huge ugly ribbon cables!

One thing that I've pondered, is having a drive with internal raid... Let me eloborate...

You have a HD, one motor to spin the platters, and two indipendent sets of read/write heads. The drive would have 16mb cache, 8mb for each sets of heads. The heads would split the drive in 2, and you would have internal RAID 0 striping.

This could. With Serial ATA, you could either just plug into the drive twice, or perhaps it could work with just one plug.

I don't know if this idea is overkill or not... but hey, sounds good to me. And if it's a really good idea... let me go work on my patent before you tell anyone :D;)

Wouldn't it be smarter to simply make it one drive then? Like stacking all the heads and platters you have in one pile and use one interface (Like all drives do today), I don't think it would be better if multi-platter drives had somehow RAID'ed them isnted. Just my thinking though.

that is basically twice the complexity. The hdd would have to be 1.5times height, or 2times height of a normal drive

I'm missing your point :p

I voted indifferent, simply cause SCSI does now and will always own the ATA interface. :) And thats all I run in my workstation, and servers.

Also the term "ATA SCSI" Is like saying a "Copper Fiber network connection" ATA and SCSI are 2 TOTALLY different interfaces, the protocol backing both is 200% different.

Serial SCSI may be a possability, but ATA SCSI sounds like the ATA interface with some extentions to make it look like SCSI... gotta love gimicks! Also as far as "serial SCSI" is concerned its been around by another name for many years - Fibre Channel. Thats a extremely fast serial communications that is based on an extended SCSI protocol.

Also here is a factoid to store in the back of your heads:

Max throughput on a PCI bus is 133Mb for the entire bus ( shared for all the cards) for that reason, anything over ATA 133 is sorta pointless. This is why most multi channel or RAID U2W or U160 SCSI cards are 64bit/33mhz or some are even 64bit/66Mhz PCI. ( 533Mb/sec)

basically its little stuff the over all system bandwidth, multiplice device capaticy and other details already mentioned which is gonna make it much much better... they basically haev all the weak points of parallel ata and tried to fix it up with serial.

least thats what i get from it all....

Joe, thats why I'm looking at a 66mhz promise fasttrack raid controller to use on my 66mhz pci slot in my iwill/abit/epox/asus/chaintech dual athlon board

wait wait wait... you are going to go with a 66Mhz IDE controler... hahahahaahha

man thats like buying the top end Ford Pinto, its the best of the breed but still sucks ass compared to a real car :)

it's the same price as every other raid controller, but it adds that feature.

Just like buying a Corvette for the price of a Camaro if you ask me

But yer still driving on ATA... quite a serious waste.


Buy some real HD's and a real board if you want to warrant it.

I have the real board, and I am thinking about scsi

actually, even though the PCI bus is limited at 133mb/s, current IDE drives only can transfer data around 40mb/s, so there is still room for improvement, but the fact is, 64bit PCI slots will be standard in all systems in the years to come.

yeah, with current drives, but that number will slowly grow, I'm waiting for 10k ide.

As for 66mhz 64bit pci, remember pci-x, 133mhz, 64bit, and 3gio