Serial ATA Drives - What The Hold Up?

[Blackjack]

Does anyone have any idea about why Seagate and others are not able to ship the serial ATA drives? They have been promised for about a year now. I bought a mobo to accept them but there are no drives available.

It is a technical problem? A production problem? Marketing strategy? Politics? Contractual hangup? What gives?

 

[papasmurf]

it is expensive to switch. and not really worth it performance wise. also there are few powersupplies if any out that have the connections. they dont want to make a lot of something and have it not sell because users would have to buy new parts other than just hard drives. it is risky for them

In battle Israel uses F-16's and big ass tanks, Palestine uses small children strapped to bombs. Which do you support?

 

[indigo_wolf]

Serial ATA drives are available. www.harddrive.com carries the the Seagate SATA Barracuda 120GB for @ $209. Compare this to Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 120GB for @ $199.

The last poster's comment about current ATX power supplies not carrying the right kind of power supply connector is correct, but Harddrive.com will sell you an adapter for the standard 4-pin HDD power connector.

Not sure what kind of performance you can expect from it. If that is not your primary concern, and you are more interested in ditching the ribbon cables and master/slave connections, you can get a HighPoint 1540 Serial ATA controller 4 port kit (which includes, 4 1-meter SATA cables, 4 ATA133 to SATA convertors, and power connectors that connect to the standard HDD power connector and to the convertor).

There is a review of the 2 port version of the critter elsewhere on TomsHardware, as well as comparisons to other makers' products.

I expect slowness of widespread SATA acceptance is due to the fact that HDD performance is not quite at the top of the list for the "average consumer" (whatever that is). Most of them are more likely to add more memory or pony up their dollars for the CPU of the day.

Add to that multi-corporation standards committees are not the most nimble of creatures... just the nature of the beast. Evidence of this can be seen in the lagged turnover from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0.

Hope that helps to some degree...

Cheers,
Sam

 

[Crashman]

It has nothing to do with the average consumer yet. Performance freaks won't even buy them yet, at least performance freaks who understand hardware, because SATA drives don't offer any performance advantage. The fastest drives in the industry aren't faster than the ATA133 standard. Even 15k RPM SCSI drives can't touch 133MB/s transfer rate. And even if they could, PC boards don't support more than 133MB/s for PCI devices, which SATA interfaces are.

In other words, it's a waste of money. Forget perceptions about what the extra performance is worth, because there is no extra performance. You spend more money and get nothing more out of it.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[alltaken]

well i can buy SATA HDDs from my local shop right now.

and i live in New Zealand which is at the other side of the world.
so i don't see why you can't get them

200Gb is the largest one i've seen and 60 Gb is the smallest

here is a link to the website here which i looked at

www.pp.co.nz

i don't wanna use markup in my signature!!!!

 

[Crashman]

It's not that they aren't available, it's that demand is so low that many of our major online retailers don't bother to carry them. I'm sure there are specialty shops that have them.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Cuda]

As far as performance goes. The only SATA drive that "might" be worth using at this point is the soon to be released Western Digital Raptor. Assuming you don't already have a nice SCSI controller and SCSI drives.

 

[Twitch]

Crash:

A question and an observation:

Do you think the Canterwood chipset from Intel, which will have native support for SATA on the southbridge, will demonstrate a tangible improvement in SATA performance?

Also, I saw a review at ClubOC...they tested two Seagate Cuda V's with SATA in a RAID 0, and the Cudas beat the two WD's (the former champs) in RAID 0 pretty handily--despite losing out in the single drive tests. Access times were slightly better, and mbyte/sec was 57 on the Cudas, compared to 50 on the WD's. Do you think that can be attributed to the SATA's better bandwidth?


I want to move to space, so I can overclock processors cooled to absolute zero.

 

[Crashman]

I doubt Canterwood is planned for SATA, but they could always modify their original plans and add it.

As for the SATA RAID vs Parallel RAID, SATA could not have been the advantage. Why? SATA does NOT have a faster interfact at the moment. Why? SATA right now is 150, but capped at 133MB/s by the CPU bus. So why the advantage? Perhaps the drives themselves were designed to respond better in RAID configuration. OR perhaps the SATA controller was more efficient than the ATA controller. Maybe both? I've heard that these Cuda V SATA drives are designed better in nearly every way than previous ATA drives. It's definately not the interface, more likely the drives themselves, and perhaps a better controller chip.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Twitch]

This from the THG CeBit blurb about the new ASUS motherboards based on Canterwood and Springdale chipsets, P4C800 and P4PE800 respectively...

A new Southbridge unit will be available to go along with the new chipsets. Basically, the ICH5 offers two Serial ATA ports, which Intel also expects to replace Ultra ATA/100 and 133. As an extra treat, both of the new ASUS boards have an extra Serial ATA controller from Promise, so that there will be a total of four ports available. The latter also allows the operation of two hard drives in RAID modes 0 and 1.

This is what I was referring to when I asked about native support for SATA? Is that what they're talking about here?





I want to move to space, so I can overclock processors cooled to absolute zero.

 

[Crashman]

Yes, native support for SATA. I really didn't expect them to be releasing ICH5 so soon. Industry practice: If a technology is too expensive to become popular, force it, and the price will eventually come down!

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Twitch]

I wonder if RAID 0 support will also be native. Seems like I read somewhere that it would, but I can't seem to find it. It was probably somewhere in the slew of IDF notes I was reading...

Edited to add: Okay, I found it. In the paragraph I just cut-and-pasted in the previous post. DOH! It seems to say that the RAID support will not be native, but the Promise controller will have RAID support...

So if you decided to run a RAID array, you would probably see no benefit from the native SATA support...right? Since the RAID is part of the Promise controller, and not the ICH5 native ports...or am I missing something here?

A few SATA reviews I read intimated that native support on the southbridge would improve SATA performance. How? Does it bypass the PCI bus that way?



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


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Twitch on 03/01/03 11:24 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

You know, they could probably put RAID support for integrated controllers in BIOS if they wanted to bad enough, after all, Win2k and XP can do software RAID. But the demand would likely be extremely low as most people put there CD drives and so forth on the integrated controller

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>