Serial ATA HD question

[EluSiOn]

I have question about Serial ATA Hard Drives

I only know Serial ATA are faster than ATA 133 but what is the adventage of Serial ATA? is it able to handle insane PCI mhz when Overclocked?

In addition, is there any Serial ATA RAID card out there? supporting RAID 5 would be a great PLUS.

Also, some people says IBM drives are better but some prefer Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V, is there any other drive out there better than Barracuda Serial ATA V ? (not counting SCSI/Firewire/Fibre Channel Drives)

[Matt761]

One improvement about serial ata is that it is less likly to get and error in the data

[Top Hat Theater]

smaller cable too so less clutter in the case. Currently, serial ATA is running at ATA150 (I think) but you won't really see any performance gains (same deal as with ATA133). The big advantage is serial ATA allows for much higher capacity drives.

~THT

[BaldHeadedDork]

The biggest advantage to S-ATA are for the major manufacturers. I've heard it will free an IRQ. That's not as important today as it was, say, five years ago. But it will help, especially on a mass production high end system with a ton of junkware installed.

But the biggest advantage will be the slightly reduced cost of cables. Don't laugh, I'm serious. Saving a dime by using smaller and simpler to manufacture S-ATA cables adds up to serious jack when you multiply it by two million units annually.

Which drive to recommend is almost impossible right now. Maxtor, Seagate and IBM have new series of drives coming out that look very good. But I haven't seen any reviews yet or played with one so I can't say.


BHD

[Crash893]

i hear the tech will probably too out at about ata 350 or 300 not really sure

but another advatages is there is no more master slave drives

[Tecumseh]

Other than reducing the cable clutter, the short term advantages
are small. The limitation is still the PCI bus. Total shared transfer
rate can't go over 133 MB/s. Of course, what drives can sustain
that rate. All this talk of higher transfer rate for the next geration
of SATA drives is bogus until we get drives/RAIDs that can keep
up and a faster PCI bus to carry the traffic.:(

[Johnny Knoxville]

late next year pci-x will be released and it have 10 times the bandwidth of pci, it will be a completely different ball game with hard drives then

[Stumpjumper5200]

pci/x sounds cool, but it won't be a different ball game just yet.

hard drives themselves have to get faster. not the bus, not the transfer technology, but the disk itself.

hard drives IMO suck. :D I'd like to have one huge block of RAM that's not volitile. (It's called magnetic ram, something scientists are playing with)

there has to be a better way, because we'll only be able to spin a disk so fast.

[Crash893]

i never understood why they didnt put a second or third set of read write heads in the hdd

kinda like raid 0 built in

i always wanted to just make a bank of ram with all i have laying around here even if i did need an external power supply

[EluSiOn]

argh~~~! I really want to run RAID 5 with Serial ATA HD...... is there any cards out there do that?

I only know 3Ware Escalade 8500 series can do that... but it is about US$ 369, do you guys think it is worth it?

[Stumpjumper5200]

hey crash - me too, check this out:

http://www.voidedwarranty.com/reviews/52/index.shtml

sweeet

[Tecumseh]

I own a Cenatek Rocket drive. While you can run tests to show
it's fast, it's not THAT fast. Mine's a 1 GB drive.

The problem is this company sells the drives with a BIOS chip that
completely prevents you from adding your own RAM. To upgrade
my drive I would have to get a BIOS (on the rocketdrive) upgrade
and buy RAM from them. They charge WAY too much.

This policy is completely unreasonable. I have spoken with them
a number of times. Can't get past it.

No, you can't just buy a 4 GB drive and have them populate it
with 1 GB.

In real life these drives and the software ramdrives have a very
narrow niche where they actually pay off.

Cenatek is a perfect example of a company which has an OK
product, but tries to control and screw it's customers. Kind
of like M$. :(

[EluSiOn]

Argh~~! I just got the idea from other forum

Promise FastTrak SX4000, Serial ATA Raid Card that supports 66 mhz and also Raid 5. Price tag @ amazingly low US$ 150

I think with NForce2 mobo it can become the OC king!

[Stumpjumper5200]

You mean a 64-bit 66mhz PCI slot?

I don't think nForce2 boards have that. I've only seen dual CPU boards with them.

[gingo]

Anyone have a pic of the serial ATA cables? Are they rounded? It would be great to get rid of cable clutter, even with rounded IDE cables.

Are CDROM, CDRW, DVDROM, ect drives S-ATA compatible?

[EluSiOn]

go here.. http://www.3ware.com/products/cables.asp

serial ATA cable are smaller than IDE cables and

serial ATA cable would actually powers the HD. <---- NO TRUE

there are serial ATA convertors so your normal IDE can work with serial ATA via that converter.... there are some other better converter pics out there.... and the 3ware one sucks a bit

[Stumpjumper5200]

Wait, the serial ata cable would power the HD too? So you wouldn't need a molex connector??

I don't know, I haven't heard anything like that. That would be a big change, because now the motherboard would have to handle a lot more power.......

[Crash893]

it still has a power connector

i dont know if its molex or not

it looked like a serial ata cable on the pic i was show in a mag
but it could be a molex or something ( i wouldnt imagen they would not have some sort of adapter)

[EluSiOn]

http://www.dansdata.com/images/highpoint_sata/rocketheads520.jpg

http://www.dansdata.com/images/highpoint_sata/satacable520.jpg

http://www.dansdata.com/images/highpoint_sata/conncomp560.jpg

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/it7max2/images/03.jpg

http://www.avlab.com.tw/images/serial_ata/b_0059_001.jpg

I think I am wrong about Serial ATA supply power to HD... I was confused when I see the convertors.... Storage Forum does not let you display IMG? how bizzare!


Serial ATA Specs:
The following excerpt quoted from Serial ATA 1.0 gold Technical Specifications as pertaining to our Technology Evaluation and possible eventual implementations.

Goals and objectives

Serial ATA is defined with the following goals and requirements listed in no particular order:

Primary inside-the-box storage connection (no outside the box).

Completely SW transparent w/ ATA (easy transition).

Low pin count for both host and devices (2 pairs).

Favorable (low) voltages.

Supports lower cost device architectures.

Higher performance than equivalent ATA (data rate, queuing, overlap) w/ scalability to higher.

Much better cabling/connectors (thin, flexible).

Includes efficient power delivery.

No software dependency. Relatively easy transition (price, IHV NRE and capital inventory.

risk, wide variety of devices at intro, etc.).

Power management and power consumption suitable for mobile use.

Allows roadmap spanning ~10 years.

Cable length comparable to ATA (<1 m).

Transfer rate exceeding best ATA (~150 MB/s) with scalability to higher rates.

Light protocol allowing overhead latencies to be minimized.

Asynchronous only (no isochronous requirements).

No Peer-peer transfer support (to/from host only).

Provides support for 1st party DMA access to host.

Cost competitive with equivalent parallel ATA solution at introduction (host + device + cable).

Storage device centric (no cameras/scanners/printers).

Easy installation/configuration (plug/play, no jumpers, no external terminators).

Single host (no multi-initiators or host/host networking).


from http://www.buildorbuy.org/serialata.html

[s[H]sIkuA]

SATA Generation 1 (150) which is now available is still the beginning

Later there will be SATA II which will run at 300 and SATA III(600)

Although I don't know when ,maybe two or more years :D

[A380]

The limit of SATA is still the PCI bus.
They planned to do 3 SATA generations.
Now the first one is out, but they are faking on us!
The SATA drives that are out know, don't support all the features which they should do, like hot plug&play and so on. The speed improvements on the first generation of theses drives equals 0.
A380

[EluSiOn]

hot swap is only feature avail on RAID I thought. I am not very sure of it.

However, I check

http://www.infoxpress.com/reviewtracker/reprints.asp?page_id=1428
and
http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/Escalade8500.pdf

It shows that this Serial ATA Raid Card supports hot swap/hot spare

(hot plug&play should be a feature of USB/Firewire. SATA does not have an EXT interface)

[A380]

http://www.serialata.org/

http://www.serialata.org/collateral/zipdownloads/SerialATA10Gold.zip

That's where you get all the exact informations from ;)

Or check out here:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q3/020812/


A380

[EluSiOn]

definately agree there is no rush to SATA yet... but... the technology is very promising...

[A380]

I like the idea of SATA, but i don't like that they tell us what SATA can do, and then they bring it out and it can'T even half of it.
At least the wires are small. That's good for airflow!

But all positive sites SATA may have, it's still limited by the PCI BUS, so we shouldn't expect a high rise in speed!
A380

[Matrix78]

i have SATA hooked up and when i'm moveing things around in my case i'm afraid i'm going to break that tiny connector on my MoBo

[gingo]

So SATA hard drives are out and people are using them? I gotta get my hands on this technology, which HDD's are SATA compatible?

[Matrix78]

no, well kinda i think one is out, my mobo came with a PATA -> SATA converter

[-=Mr_B=-]

Dont like Serial ATA, Speed + is not there, Not like you actually would see a change.. And it robbs me of half my harddrives, Only one drive on each cable.. NO GOOD!

WEll, Thought id add to this.. :- )
B!

[ninthebin]

i hear the tech will probably too out at about ata 350 or 300 not reall

I heard they are gonna take it as far as ATA600

[BaldHeadedDork]

They can take it to ATA1000, but unless some Certified Effin Genius overcomes the bandwidth bottlenecks inside the hard drive it won't matter at all.


BHD

[ninthebin]

ill get right on it ;)