Serial ATA in Mini Format: 2.5" Disk Drive from Fujitsu

Conclusion - An Early Entrant With Good Prospects

One thing is clear: it will be some months yet before the Serial ATA drives and controllers start appearing in mainstream laptops. It makes no sense to use separate Serial ATA controller chips on laptop motherboards, since these would considerably increase power consumption. It is conceivable that they might be used in portable computers marketed as desktop replacements, since some of these work with regular desktop processors and are therefore not designed with low power consumption in mind - a trend started by Gericom and which continues in a large number of portable computers for the home.

Simple mounting systems for Serial ATA hard drives would make assembly easier and would considerably simplify hard disk swapping by the user. These solutions are not yet on the horizon.

The MHR2020SA offers a decent level of performance. Data transfer rates are to current standards and the access times correspond to what is currently possible with 4,200 rpm drives. We could not detect any definite advantages with Serial ATA, except that the Promise controller seems to be happy with less CPU time than the onboard controller in the Intel chipset that we used to measure the Ultra ATA drives.

The success of the first line of Serial ATA drives is now largely in Fujitsu's own hands. The company has stated that the inquiries are coming. They will therefore be providing the appropriate support for manufacturers of storage solutions and other potential customers for these drives. Who knows, perhaps set-top boxes or games consoles will be working with Serial ATA while we are still fumbling around with our ribbon cables...