Serial ATA?

[SaiyanX]

Hey, I'm going to buy myself a new hdd and does anyone know if there are any Serial ATA hdd's out there? What is the difference between that and IDE. Is it worth getting an Serial ATA drive? I heard that companies made them already but aren't shipping them till next year. Please respond thanks.

 

[itsalark]

Seagate will supposedly ship an Serial ATA drive in Jan 2003. If you had two otherwise identical drives (one Serial ATA, one Parallel ATA) there wouldn't be any discernible difference in performance. Today's drives will not saturate
an ATA100 interface (nor ATA66 AFAIK). Serial ATA will allow for longer cables (approx. 3' vs 18" for ATA). Cables are also narrower which can reduce clutter and improve cooling within your PC. There will be greater availability of Serial ATA drives after Intel releases the Springdale +
Camden(?) chipsets (1H 2003) which natively support Serial ATA.

 

[Milkman]

I believe the drives went on sale earlier this week. This ia the link that I found.

http://www.pcconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?sku=415061&SourceID=k15506

 

[mattburklund]

Maxtor has had theres out for quite some time, you can buy it off of there site maxstore.com

 

[karlos_luis]

I dont see any SATA drives at maxtore.com

 

[jheine]

There are a few vendors listing SATA drives, but they don't seem to be available anywhere except directly through Seagate at the moment. You may want to wait until it goes into full distribution, probably within the next month. Aslo, you'll probably pay a good premium ove other ATA drives, so it may not be worth it unless you really need them.

Actually, considering the amount of MOBOs coming out with SATA added, you'd think drive moanufaturers would try to get them out ASAP. Sure you can use an adapter, but I think there's a performance drop associated with it.

Jarrett

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[Rob423]

if clearing clutter and getting better airflow is all sATA is doing for us right now... then i'd reccomend just buying Rounded ATA cables... they work excellent and free up space, also easy to work with

Is THG Slightly Slacking??

 

[vegandago]

yeah but have you seen serial ata cables? they are considerably smaller than even rounded IDE cables. Plus serial ata is hot-swappable.

"There is no dark or light side, only power and those too weak to seek it."

 

[karlos_luis]

yes, I need two HDDs badly right now, so I wanted to get them w/SATA interface. If they perform at least the same as ATA100 thats fine by me. I'll just be happy with the cables, and maybe I can play with the RAID controller on my new P4PE. I need to replace my old 40GB maxtor ASAP, I ran out of space.

I've heard bad news about the seagates sata drives (barracuda V??) so I was waiting for the maxtor ones to come out, but boy, it is taking a while, everybody is out of stock, and I need a new HDD last week

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by karlos_luis on 01/06/03 03:34 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

Serial ATA has a lot of disadvantages over current standards.
1.) Only one drive is supported per cable, so even though the cables are smaller, having a lot of drives means having a mess of cables floating around.
2.) You would need 4 Serial ATA ports to have as many drives as two standard ATA ports, most boards don't have that many
3.) You'll hear about Serial ATA actually supporting MORE drives than parallel ATA through the use of hubs/switches. All this will do is add even more clutter to the inside of your computer
4.) Serial ATA hard drives are expensive and hard to find. CD drives are non-existant.
5.) Adapters for standard parallel drives to the Serial ATA bus are very costly.

Let's not forget that drive speeds have only doubled in the past 5 years, and are still operating at less than half the available speed of ATA133. So even in 5 years there won't be an advantage in typical configurations.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[mattburklund]

I called maxstore a month back and asked them about that, then he pointed me to a place on there site that had it, But now I cant find it there myself, so I may call again, and let you know. I hope they didnt pull it.

 

[karlos_luis]

Crashman, who wants to have a desktop with "a lot of drives"? With the size of HDDs nowadays I think more than 2 HDDs is ridiculous. Who needs more SATA ports? 2 you can get onboard is more than enough. Why bother with CD/DVD roms? leave them on PATA so you use 1 cable for both. Now you are telling you want multiple CDs and DVD units as well? oh well..
Who wants adapters? no need for them. SATA very costly? does not look that way to me..I think prices are very good actually and they are not even out yet... as far as your statement on speed, so you are saying today's ATA133 drives are running at less than ATA66, dont think so.

 

[karlos_luis]

thanks mattburklund

 

[Rob423]

yeah 2 hds.. and 2 5.25 bays is more then enough...


Is THG Slightly Slacking??

 

[Lamoni]

so you are saying today's ATA133 drives are running at less than ATA66, dont think so.

Actually, I think you should look for hard drives that have transfer rates above 66 MB/s. I think that the only ones you will find are SCSI drives with at least 10k rpm. Even those usually have an average transfer rate much below that. So you would need to go with a 15k rpm drive.

I do agree that most desktops don't need more than 2 HD's. If you want a lot of hard drives, then moving to SCSI is a better choice. I do like SATA cables, and you can always get a PCI card to support 2-4 more drives. While that would mean a lot of cables, it would still take up less space than the IDE cables would. Anyway, I still have a case where I can't use the top two drive bays unless I go to 40 pin cables and settle for ATA33. I know that isn't a big deal, but Serial ATA has a lot of benefits even if it has none on speed. Companies like Seagate are supposed to put more RAM on their SATA versions of their drives though. Sort of like video card manufacturers upping the clock speed and shipping it with 8x.

 

[Crashman]

OK, say you have 2 hard drives, one for programs, and one to backup file on (rather than constantly burning CD's). Now, you also have a DVD drive and a CD-ROM drive. That's FOUR drives. So, say you want to do RAID 0. Now you have 3 hard drives, two for the raid and one for backup, you REALLY need a backup drive if you do RAID 0. Total now is 5 drives.

Those 3 hard drives could also be used for RAID5, which is slower but more secure.

Or say you want speed AND security for everything including the programs. And no need to move files between drives. Well RAID 5 is a bit slower, so you go RAID 10 (0+1). Now you have 4 hard drives and two CD drives. This is not excessive, but you'll certainly be using a lot of cables and connections!

I've seen at most 2 headers for SATA on a board. And I consider 2 hard drives to be a minimum, unless you live dangerously!

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[slickstaa]

I agree that the one device per cable limit is a problem that needs to be addressed. However, the fact that there is only one device per cable would theoretically lead to better performance wouldn't it? Maybe the solution is simply more controllers onboard.


<font color=blue> If it ain't broke, don't fix it...tweak it.</font color=blue>

 

[gaviota]

Who needs "lots" of drives?...anybody who does video editing needs lots of drives.
I currently have a 120 GB as main drive, an old 40 GB drive I carried over from my previous PC as slave. In the secondary ATA port I have a DVD recorder as primary and a DVD/CDRW drive as slave. On the onboard RAID controller I have a stripped array made up of 2 80 GB drives...that's 320 GB in 4 hard disks plus 2 DVD/CD drives.
And I only have about 33% free space right now, so in a couple of months I will add a couple of 200 GB disks to my stripped array, for a total of 720 GB in 6 hard disks, plus the 2 DVD/CD drives.

__________________________________________________
It's not important to know all the answers, as long as you know how to contact someone who does.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by gaviota on 01/08/03 04:22 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Owl]

http://www.geocities.com/eastcentralpc/

Still wating & wating & Wating,

80GB SERIAL ATA HD 7200 RPM 9MS 3.5LP BARRACUDA. NEW, AND FACTORY SEALED. BACK ORDERED TIL 3/28/03
$137.00 ea.

or

st3120023as-20pk 120gb 20pk serial ata hd
7200 rpm 9ms 3.5lp barracuda ata v new & factory sealed.
(Part - ST3120023AS-20PK) BACK ORDERED TIL 3/28/03
$3,329.00



<font color=blue>HOSED = Horrific operating system error detected</font color=blue>

 

[jheine]

OK, so for a basic user, one or two drives are enough. For PCs that are more "workstation" orientated, like A/V editing, more is definately needed. I have to agree with gaviota on that point. Right now I'm using 2 80GB in a RAID 0, a DVD drive, and a CDRW. I'm considering adding another 80GB drive to use as a system drive, and will be adding a second CDRW. While I put two devices on each IDE controller, I'd rather not, especially when it comes to putting a HDD and a CDRW or DVD on the same cable.

Realistically, running that many drives, you need another controller anyways, so I really don't see the downside of only having two SATA connections on the mobo. Sure IDE can support two devices per channel, but if your performance concious, your not going to.

Jarrett

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[Lamoni]

Who needs "lots" of drives?...anybody who does video editing needs lots of drives.

Well that may be a larger percentage than I originally thought, but for occasional video editing, 80 GB is often enough. If you do a lot of video editing, you would probably need more drives so serial ATA wouldn't be the best option. Isn't it nice that Hard Drive capacities keep increasing? With 2 200GB Hard Drives, you can still do quite a bit of video editing before running out of space. Eventually we will all want terabyte hard drives though.

I only use one Hard Drive in my system and one CD-RW. I wish serial ATA wasn't taking so long to come to market. It won't be best in everybody's system because of the limit to one drive per cable, but it will sure be nice in the majority of systems built.