IEEE 1394 vs Serial ATA

[alloran]

I was wondering why the push to another ATA Standard (aka ATA - Serial) when other, possibly better options, already exist in the form of Firewire and the faster version yet to come? I like the idea of an interface which already runs faster then current ATA modes 66/100/133, allows a greater number of drives(64), internal and external connections, and already in most new computers. Am I missing some bad side to IEEE 1934, that makes us have to move to Serial ATA? Is it merly cost factor. Serial ATA requires a individual cable for each drive from the controller, could be quite the stretch for some cases. While the daisy chain of IEEE 1394 can create problems. Drive to drive transfers, or multiple drive reads faster on one verses the other?

Interested to hear any opinions, or facts.

 

[elzt]

The transfer rate of the current IEEE 1934 can only go up to 400 Mbps, that's about 50MByte/s. So it's not fast enough for HDs.

 

[Twitch]

I've seen benchmarks on Firewire hard drives. Lower transfer rates, lower burst rates, higher access times, higher CPU utilization...what's not to like about Firewire?

SATA is a much more convenient and powerful standard since it is simply an improvement on existing ATA/IDE standards. You can plug an adaptor into the back of a PATA drive and run a SATA cable to it and it will work fine. It is projected that SATA can reach 600 megabytes per second transfer--a factor of 15 more than Firewire.

Current external drives created for Firewire have to use a Firewire to IDE interpreter, leaving the drive with a much smaller data pipe and poor performance. True Firewire drives don't exist and the ones that say Firewire all depend on that convergance technology. I think what you're proposing would also require a little too radical of a shift in technology by hard-drive and chipset manufacturers.

Now, if you say all external devices should be Firewire, I will agree with you. I don't know why Intel is so crazy about USB 2.0. Probably because it isn't Apple's baby.

<-----Insert witty sig line here.


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Twitch on 03/03/03 10:10 PM.</EM></FONT></P>