Serial ATA drives

[IdreamofDSl]

Just wondering if anybody knows when serial ATA hard drives are going to hit the shelves? I am waiting to upgrade my system when they do.

[jacheatamobits]

theres no telling, but why not just g'head and upgrade now, and wait till it does come out, and buy a controller card ( buying a mobo now with SATA )

[BaldHeadedDork]

Originally posted by IdreamofDSl
Just wondering if anybody knows when serial ATA hard drives are going to hit the shelves? I am waiting to upgrade my system when they do.

The earliest ship date I've seen for S-ATA hard drives is December. When products show up on shelves is another matter. I hope to be wrong, but I don't expect anything until the first of January.

Notice that no one has talked about when optical drives will move to S-ATA. If you want to get rid of all the IDE cables in your system, you'll have a heck of a wait. '

This is just my opinion, and we all know what that's worth, but I don't consider S-ATA a dealbreaker when deciding to build or wait.

Whatever performance increase it brings will likely only appear in a benchmark program. No one is projecting the kind of boost it takes to create a measurable increase in applications. Nor will the release of S-ATA drives will not mark the end of parallel drives or controllers. There are literally hundreds of millions of ATA100 optical and magnetic drives in use and it will take years, perhaps decades, for the old standard to fade away. (In the meantime, ATA100 will gravytrain its way onto drive and motherboard upgrades along the way.)

S-ATA will be on the menu for my next full-system build, which will probably hit in summer of 2004. In between now and then I'll do a mobo upgrade when stable Dual DDR boards ship next spring or summer, and maybe a proc upgrade next winter if there's a good deal to be had. But S-ATA can wait until I'm ready to build from the ground up again.


BHD

[WildArmSX]

well Western Digital Has just made a 200gb hdd that is S-ATA compatable. i think it suppose to be out soon.

[Tecumseh]

I think SATA will explode onto the scene next year. The big issue
will be that MBs will have built-in SATA connectors---probably 4, 6
and 8 will be common. Remember SATA has one connector and one
cable for each drive---not like 2 for EIDE.

All the after-market controller card makers like Promise have stuff
ready to go.

What's interesting is that SATA could also eventually kill SCSI.

Time will tell. :D

[CaptBill]

I thought Frys already had a hd out.

[IdreamofDSl]

I have searched on the net a couple of weeks ago and found no Serial ATA hard drives for sale yet. I will be doing a ground up build and will be retiring my current system to be used as a game server.

I should probably wait for serial ATA 300 wich is the second release from the Serial ATA 150 that will first hit the stores but I don't know if I can wait that long. I don't realy care about the optical drives because I am just interested in the faster hard drives. Think about it, Raid 0, Serial ATA 300. That will be fast.

The only thing that is unknown at this point is how well serial ata drives and controllers overclock. But I guess it does'nt matter because most mobos have a pci divider now anyways.