Anyone know when we will see Serial ATA, or how it will perform?

[Noriaki]

I've been seriously considering going SCSI the last few days, I don't mind the extra cost of SCSI, as long as it's worth it and I'm not just wasting money. After some careful deliberation I've decided that it is worth it for me to move to SCSI.

My only concern now is the upcoming Serial ATA... I don't really know what to expect from it. I don't want to push a bunch of money into SCSI and find out that ATA has finally caught up with Serial mode. My primary concern is CDRW performance, but I'm also considering grabbing a 10,000rpm hard drive.

So does anyone know what the performance of S-ATA will be, or when we will see performance specs of it? Or is it still years off and I'm totally out of my mind .

 

[StanFL]

Its been a while since I've seen anything on serial ATA but I believe in its initial release it will have 150 megabytes per sec thruput capability (and forget about having seperate IDE channels with serial, all devices will daisy chain)with later revisions increasing the thruput. As far as time frame I think it was due late this year, could be wrong.

 

[DarkManX]

yea but its still gonna be useing the same old 7200RPM drives for a while right? If i had the money id go for SCSI Ultra160

 

[Imaginer]

I heard there would only be a few wires instead of a ribbon cable type deal. Is it true or I am getting information crossed?

 

[Pariah]

The serial ATA spec is due in fall of this year, with actual roll out of products not scheduled until 2002. The current plan is for a 1.5Gbps connection, or roughly 190MB/s. The serial nature of the interface will reduce the cable requirements down to 2 wires instead of the 40/80 IDE currently uses.

 

[Xtremist]

Check out a past thread I started:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=177175

thorin gave a great site with info in it here:

http://www.pcaccelerate.com/News/SerialATA/serialata.html

"But in addition to faster performance, the new Serial ATA standard offers so many other benefits that it will almost definitely wipe out the old parallel ATA standard next year."

I'm hoping to get a new system next year that's Serial-ATA, DDR RAM, well everything that's in the thread I linked above I guess

According to that site, the connectors will be 6-8 pin and can provide power to the device in that same cable. It's also backwards compatible (of course) with current HDD's and IDE devices, so no worries there. I'm personally very excited and highly anticipating it's release... Cheers!

 

[Soccerman]

heh, yes I know alot about this new one.. much of it has been said already. we haven't been told too much, but I'm doubtful it will beat SCSI in performance terms (not transfer rate, but CPU usage, etc).

Other then that, most of it has been said. except in order to use current drives on it, you need a converter of some sort. The plugs and communication standards are way different.