Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Serial ATA arrives...finally!
Posted by Jason Dunn in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 01:00 PM
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,103268,tk,dn073002X,00.asp
I've been waiting for Serial ATA for quite some time, so this is an exciting announcement! What's still missing, however, is the increase in data throughput from the hard drives themselves. We now have no bottleneck from the interface, but we need hard drives capable of spitting up more data. Between this announcement and the forthcoming processors from AMD (Clawhammer, Opteron) and Intel (3 Ghz before Christmas), this will be a good year to upgrade. Start saving that loose change!
"Enter Serial ATA, the successor technology we examined on a prototype hard drive from Seagate. Debuting with a speed of 150 MBps and having the potential to scale up to 600 MBps, Serial ATA provides the headroom needed for faster drives in the future. And because it uses 3-volt (instead of 5-volt) signals, it will work better with the low-power motherboard chip sets and CPUs coming soon. Unlike parallel ATA drives, the serial model we installed in our Windows 2000 test system required no master or slave designation. We simply plugged one end of the 0.25-inch cable into the drive and the other into a supplied Silicon Image Serial ATA card that we plugged into a PCI slot. (The thin cable also permits better airflow and more-compact system designs.)
Seagate will offer its Serial ATA drive this fall. Maxtor and Western Digital promise to provide the interface on some drives by year's end--about when Via expects to integrate it into PC chip sets. Intel plans to follow suit in 2003. Users also have new capacities to look forward to, thanks to an increase in drive-platter areal density from 40GB to 60GB. With two platters, Seagate's Barracuda ATA V will hold 120GB. Western Digital's new Caviar model should reach 200GB. Later this fall, look for both Maxtor and IBM to launch their own ultrahigh-capacity products as well."
I've been waiting for Serial ATA for quite some time, so this is an exciting announcement! What's still missing, however, is the increase in data throughput from the hard drives themselves. We now have no bottleneck from the interface, but we need hard drives capable of spitting up more data. Between this announcement and the forthcoming processors from AMD (Clawhammer, Opteron) and Intel (3 Ghz before Christmas), this will be a good year to upgrade. Start saving that loose change!
"Enter Serial ATA, the successor technology we examined on a prototype hard drive from Seagate. Debuting with a speed of 150 MBps and having the potential to scale up to 600 MBps, Serial ATA provides the headroom needed for faster drives in the future. And because it uses 3-volt (instead of 5-volt) signals, it will work better with the low-power motherboard chip sets and CPUs coming soon. Unlike parallel ATA drives, the serial model we installed in our Windows 2000 test system required no master or slave designation. We simply plugged one end of the 0.25-inch cable into the drive and the other into a supplied Silicon Image Serial ATA card that we plugged into a PCI slot. (The thin cable also permits better airflow and more-compact system designs.)
Seagate will offer its Serial ATA drive this fall. Maxtor and Western Digital promise to provide the interface on some drives by year's end--about when Via expects to integrate it into PC chip sets. Intel plans to follow suit in 2003. Users also have new capacities to look forward to, thanks to an increase in drive-platter areal density from 40GB to 60GB. With two platters, Seagate's Barracuda ATA V will hold 120GB. Western Digital's new Caviar model should reach 200GB. Later this fall, look for both Maxtor and IBM to launch their own ultrahigh-capacity products as well."
