Sata

[WinFlex]

So the big deal about SATA is not really a huge performance gain, as some reviews have shown. However, it will be nice to get rid of those huge, air-flow obstructing paralell IDE cables. However, what will happen to devices such as CDrom's, ZIP drives, and even floppies? Will these devices eventually also have small, thin SATA-like connections?
If not, I do not really see the point in spending the extra money for SATA.

[ninthebin]

it just conforms to the usual benefits of Serial over Parallel...as its only sending one bit at a time it so it can be pushed to transfer rates that parallel - although probably capable of - would cause more data corruption

there is also some thing about parallel actually consuming 8 clock pulses before sending data where serial uses 1 ...

SATA is 7pins...parallel is 40...the maximum cable length of Serial is 1meter - serial ata uses less voltage

I believe SATA also negates Master/slave as it uses its own bus - where if you had two ATA100 drives - you would want a nice 200MB/s system going on with the two of them...on parallel due to the shared nature it would have delays in usage so it would be considerably less

cant remember anything else - Ill hvae to go find that article I read

[BaldHeadedDork]

Eventually optical drives will move to S-ATA. When is anyone's guess. So far as I know no drive maker has set a date for when they will start the switch. I would expect it no sooner than this time next year.

I don't think you'll see a S-ATA Zip or floppy drive. Both (along with the LS-120) are fading drive standards, and I don't expect any company to offer an S-ATA version of a drive with a constantly shrinking user base.

But this doesn't mean P-ATA or floppy ports will disappear from your motherboard anytime soon. The installed base of parallel ATA optical and magnetic drives runs into the hundreds of millions of devices. Eventually you'll be able to buy CD and DVD drives with S-ATA connectors, but it will be many years before P-ATA fully disappears from our computers.




BHD

[ninthebin]

with pcs that always the way - look how long ISA survived...

[jacheatamobits]

about the floppies... i, for one, do not use them.. just as i dont use cassete tapes anymore...

about the cdroms... they will eventualy migrate to SATA, and zip drives are pointless, IMO