Author Topic: Serial ATA (Read 328 times)

Pfunk · « **on:** February 24, 2003, 11:53:21 AM »

Whats its advantages/disadvantages? Seagate is shipping the 1st Serial ATA HardDrive, just wondering if the 120GB HD is worth $200

bloom25 · « **Reply #1 on:** February 26, 2003, 04:56:08 PM »

SATA has a higher peak transfer rate, but current drives won't see any performance boost from it. (I don't know if the new 10K rpm drives can, as there are no benchmarks of them yet...)

Current advantages: Convienience, improved airflow, smaller size, no master/slave config issues.

Disadvantages: Drives currently carry a price premium over standard IDE drives, cables and drives very rare at the moment.

Mini D · « **Reply #2 on:** February 26, 2003, 06:55:21 PM »

If all else were equal... going from a fricking parallel ribbon to a small serial cable is worth it alone.

MiniD

TIGS · « **Reply #3 on:** February 27, 2003, 09:59:40 AM »

Here's a shot of what Parallel ATA cable looks like along with the new Serial ATA cable - and they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Right now - this is the specifications of SATA:

SATA Spec 1.0 has 150 MB/s transfer (about 14 MB/s faster than PATA's maximum 133 MB/s output)

SATA Spec 2.0 will have 300 MB/s transfer, and I think it's going to be released in late 2004 or something, not sure exactly. Spec 3.0 will be much higher, of course.

Also found the picture of the Seagate with SATA (will post in the next post)

TIGS

TIGS · « **Reply #4 on:** February 27, 2003, 10:00:44 AM »

Picture of the Seagate Barracuda V w/ SATA (rear view, where the cables are plugged)

TIGS

Mini D · « **Reply #5 on:** February 27, 2003, 11:21:03 AM »

Now.. if they could just tie the floppy drive into that... man... talk about some cleaned up cases.

MiniD

TIGS · « **Reply #6 on:** February 27, 2003, 11:35:54 AM »

Floppy drive is almost dead - going to be obsolete by the year's end.

TIGS

Mini D · « **Reply #7 on:** February 27, 2003, 12:10:44 PM »

The current floppy technology is over 20 years old now. Wow... how many devices last that long in the PC buisness?

MiniD

TIGS · « **Reply #8 on:** February 27, 2003, 01:39:38 PM »

Yep - it's amazing it has survived over the decades - I can't think of anything related to computer hardwares that survived this long - ISA went away 5 years ago, AGP is going to slowly die by the year's end with a definite replacement next year by PCI Express. AGP has a 30 watt power output (that's why the Radeon 9700 Pro needed to be plugged with the PSU), and the PCI Express will have a 60 watt or so power output.

Everything's starting to get faster (so many data, so little time) by utilizing new features on the motherboard.. Serial ATA, PCI Express, oh yeah - let's not forget the new BIOS replacement, EFI (or Extensible Firmware Interface) will be hitting the market when 64-bit CPUs starting hitting the shelves. (OR until Microsoft Codename Longhorn goes beta)

Of these 3 components listed above, only 2 of them are used in the market today - the 64-bit EFI has been out in the server (?) market for a while with success (I think or they'd never try to market it for end-users) and of course Serial ATA.

If this is all too much for you... try being me - I'm trying to stuff all those new information in my head and making sure I don't miss anything, however I think I've missed a couple of key facts here but I think that'll do for this post. I was going to just reply on the 20-year-old floppy drive comment. ::shrugs::

TIGS