Advantages to Serial ATA other than small cables and burst rate?

[BD2003]

Are there going to be any real performance advantages to using serial ATA?

Faster burst speed is great in theory, but most hard drives today barely tax ATA/66, and probably most of us wouldnt even notice if we were at ATA/33. Hard drives are just too slow by nature.

Smaller cables are great and all, but theyre just cables, and once im done installing and my case is closed, I really couldnt care less.


How does SATA handle the master/slave distinction? Please tell me they did away with it once and for all, M/S is nothing but trouble.

Is the transfer inherently faster, does it suck less resources, or is it just parallel ata serialized and pumped through a smaller cable?

 

[GoSharks]

Originally posted by: BD2003
or is it just parallel ata serialized and pumped through a smaller cable?

basically just this. this and tagged command queuing.

The principle behind TCQ is that the device itself, that is, the
drive, is able to make an intelligent decision in which order the
data will be pulled from the platters. Without TCQ, the heads have
to bounce all over the platters to access the data. With TCQ, the
drive can determine, based on the head positioning, the most
efficient way to access the data with minimal head movement.

The simplest analogy is probably a shopping list for the
supermarket. Going down the list item by item will, in most cases,
be a very uneconomic way of shopping since it involves a huge amount
of legwork. On the other hand, adding things to the shopping cart
based on the order of how they are laid out in the store may be
easier and more economic but requires checkmarks behind each item to
verify that the task has been completed. The checkmark in this case
is equivalent to the tagged in tagged command queuing. It is easy to
see how TCQ can greatly improve the performance of a drive if the
application and the operating system can take advantage of it.

not that much

 

[Information21]

Scalability. All I can think of right now. We need a new storage medium. Later.

 

[AndyHui]

Hot pluggable (although the drives coming onto the market now are not).

 

[bgeh]

there is no master/slave on SATA
it is one channel for one drive

 

[Goi]

Later versions of SATA with chipsets natively supporting them will also free the IDE channels from the PCI bus, but rather communicate directly with the chipset via whatever speed bus it supports(266MB/s all the way to the 1GB/s speed that SiS's MuTioL(spelling?) bus supports).

 

[thorin]

Hot plugging
Command Queing
Substandtially Lower Electrical Requirements
Backwards compatability.
etc....

Have a look at the HD Interface and Standards FAQ.

Thorin