Is the World Ready for SerialATA (ASUS P4S8X)???

[GTaudiophile]

I was a little shocked to see that newegg already sells a mobo supporting SerialATA. I am referring to the ASUS P4S8X. Is the world ready for this technology, or should I say, is the technology ready for the world? Is SerialATA refined enough? Is it still buggy? Are there any SerialATA harddrives available yet? Could one expect problems or conflicts on a board that supports both traditional IDE and SerialATA?

 

[vetteguy]

Hmm..maybe this will be my new board when I get a P4 3.0GHz.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
I was a little shocked to see that newegg already sells a mobo supporting SerialATA. I am referring to the ASUS P4S8X. Is the world ready for this technology, or should I say, is the technology ready for the world? Is SerialATA refined enough? Is it still buggy? Are there any SerialATA harddrives available yet? Could one expect problems or conflicts on a board that supports both traditional IDE and SerialATA?

based on what anand saw at IDF, SATA is DEFINITELY not ready. unless you have an absolutely motionless computer

 

[TimeKeeper]

Oh....I am ready for SATA! Show me where I can get my hands on SATA HD, and I will be on my way!!!

(I have been holding myself not to upgrade into DDR 400 mobo, nor any HD even they are extremely cheap....still on single 40GB)

Minimum projection of 150mb/s, how can I not ready?

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: CTho9305

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
I was a little shocked to see that newegg already sells a mobo supporting SerialATA. I am referring to the ASUS P4S8X. Is the world ready for this technology, or should I say, is the technology ready for the world? Is SerialATA refined enough? Is it still buggy? Are there any SerialATA harddrives available yet? Could one expect problems or conflicts on a board that supports both traditional IDE and SerialATA?

based on what anand saw at IDF, SATA is DEFINITELY not ready. unless you have an absolutely motionless computer

Care to elaborate?

 

[Amused]

The connectors lost contact easily and were lose. It's a simple engineering problem that can be easily fixed. To say the technology is not ready because of this is just silly.

 

[ai42]

The connectors lost contact easily and were lose. It's a simple engineering problem that can be easily fixed. To say the technology is not ready because of this is just silly.

It's not just that, manufacuters don't have a lot of trust in the technology, as they are dropping warranty periods. There is a need for it but perhaps it is a bit premature, perhaps the next generation of Serial ATA will work out.

 

[Duvie]

Where are the reviews of this particular baord??? I hadn't heard it was released yet....

The other sis648 chipset mobos have been a disappointment to say the least on the overclockers front...low fsb stability and ddr400 problems...

 

[trasko]

Originally posted by: Duvie
Where are the reviews of this particular baord??? I hadn't heard it was released yet....

The other sis648 chipset mobos have been a disappointment to say the least on the overclockers front...low fsb stability and ddr400 problems...

Its out. It is what I'm looking at for a purchase in about a week or two. You're right about the low OC with the 648. No change for this board. They have been pretty successful with DDR PC3200 on some boards. The FSB OC and the 400MHz stability will likely be addressed in the 648DX (400MHz DDR definately).

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: ai42

The connectors lost contact easily and were lose. It's a simple engineering problem that can be easily fixed. To say the technology is not ready because of this is just silly.

It's not just that, manufacuters don't have a lot of trust in the technology, as they are dropping warranty periods. There is a need for it but perhaps it is a bit premature, perhaps the next generation of Serial ATA will work out.

How does the recent warranty reduction have anything to do with SATA? And how can manufacturers not have trust in technology that technically hasn't even been released yet?

 

[Tarmax]

So far Maxtor is the only company that dropped their warranty period (over all lines of HDs). Seagate still has a 3yr warranty on all their HDs.. and personally, that's the only company I trust for HDs, but that's besides the point.

Maxtor dropped the warranty period "to cut costs" of the HDs

So far, both Seagate and IBM still have 3 year warranties on their hard drives.. apparently, they have a lot more trust in all their hard drive's reliability.


But yeah, the 'world is ready for it' as it was put -- you make it sound so dramatic

. Serial ATA was 'supposed' to start showing up around July; but at that time, only site reviewers could get their hands on the hardware (ie. mobos). Yet, the mobos that first started showing weren't true SATA/150-capable boards. Yes, they had the connectors, but that's it. The RAID controller was a PATA controller, with the Marvell converter chips... but I digress. It's just up to the HD manufacturers now. It's probably taking them so long because they're working night and day to figure out a way to keep the connector from falling off

The world is ready because there's no feasible evolution to Parallel ATA. 100MB/s is the max it can sustain (though Maxtor would have you think differently). It's the same thing with PCI 2.1/2.2 and PCI Express. Everything is basically getting serialized, simply because of the ease of 'upgradability'. In the end it's cheaper (cuz it uses less traces/wires), and eventually, much faster. For example, PCI Express: the normal small slots are 1x slots. They're capable of transferring data at 2.5Gbits/s (~300MB/s). Now, because it's a serial connection, it's easily scalable, and can go up to.. what was it? 32x. So, 2.5Gbits/s x 32 = hmm.. 10GB/s flat (but considering the 20% overhead for the 8b/10b encoding, it would more accurately be around 8GB/s).

SATA is going to be the same way. That's how within the next few years, you're going to see SATA reach max burstable speeds of 600MB/s. Oh, and the 150MB/s is not a minimum speed. Just like all the other ATA specs.. take ATA/100 for example. The most I've seen anyone get out of those is 40MB/s. Figure, with SATA/150, you'll get anywhere between 40-60 (maybe even 70-ish) MB/s. If you stripe 2 HDs together, you would obviously get more performance..


I've just been wondering one thing: if Serial ATA is a serial connection, how are they going to handle Serial ATA-II? They're either going to have to raise the frequency (it's sitting somewhere around 1GHz right now), or they'd have to raise the # of lanes, thus raising the pin count. If they raise the pin count, that means SATA-II won't be backward compatible with SATA-I. Boy, won't we just love that

..Hope I helped a lil bit

-Tarmax

 

[Mday]

the world is ready, the industry is not. there are still some quirks in sata stuff to be worked out.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

take ATA/100 for example. The most I've seen anyone get out of those is 40MB/s. Figure, with SATA/150, you'll get anywhere between 40-60 (maybe even 70-ish) MB/s

wrong. the bottleneck is the drives, not the interface.

 

[ai42]

The world is ready because there's no feasible evolution to Parallel ATA. 100MB/s is the max it can sustain (though Maxtor would have you think differently).

If you want to go by theoretical numbers the technical max of PCI is 133MB/s. While in real world tests this you can't get that but I know you can attain burst speeds of over 100MB/s on rare occasions on an ATA/133 setup.

The funny thing is that the way Serial ATA controllers are being implented they also tied into the PCI bus, so while the interface support 150MB/s it can't do but 133MB/s due to PCI. However once a chipset manufacuter tosses in a Serial ATA controller into the southbridge it will fix that.

 

[Tarmax]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
wrong. the bottleneck is the drives, not the interface.

I never specified. Don't put words in my mouth Hell, 20:1, you don't even know what the final products will perform like..

EDIT: Mind you I was talking about the drives, not the interface.. next time make sure you read/understand everything (and if you don't, just simply ask.. don't assume)


I'll admit, it's a completely blind yet somewhat educated guess; but it's a technology that hasn't even hit the market yet. What gives you the power to say I'm wrong, when the drives.. haven't even hit the market (and THG's benchmarks were on beta hardware, and furthermore on a controller that was built for PATA)??

Originally posted by: ai42
The funny thing is that the way Serial ATA controllers are being implented they also tied into the PCI bus, so while the interface support 150MB/s it can't do but 133MB/s due to PCI. However once a chipset manufacuter tosses in a Serial ATA controller into the southbridge it will fix that.

Some of the boards based on the KT400 (ie Asus A7V8X, MSI KT4 Ultra-BSR) have a new RAID controller from Promise being built into them (PDC20376) that claims to totally support SATA up to 150MB/s, but I'm a lil skeptical even though there's not the trademark Marvell converter chips there. I haven't been able to find anything about the chip on Promise's site either =/ But my guess is, that's as close as SATA is going to get to the southbridge this year.. through the RAID controller

 

[Rand]

So far Maxtor is the only company that dropped their warranty period (over all lines of HDs). Seagate still has a 3yr warranty on all their HDs.. and personally, that's the only company I trust for HDs, but that's besides the point.

Actually Western Digital announced their dropping warranties to 1 year on their mainstream IDE drives also, only their 'JB' series will retain a 3 year warranty.
Seagate announced 2 days ago that as of October first ALL of their desktop HDD's will have a 1yr warranty, so they've actually gone even firther then Maxtor/Western Digital.

IBM is the only mainstream IDE HDD manufacturer left that's not announced a plan for 1yr warranties, though they have their own limitiations in the way of their 333Hrs/month power limitation.

I don't think the reduced warranties are in any way related to Serial ATA however, as Maxtor/Western Digital are still keeping warranties at 3yrs for their high end IDE drivers. Plus their reducing warranties for Parallel ATA as well as upcoming SerialATA drives.


As for SerialATA, IMHO is is quite obviously NOT ready for prime time. They've been working on the issues with the loose connectors for almost a half year now, and from what we've seen at IDF the problems remain.
If a system reboots because you lightly jar a connector then theirs obviously not a very good connection to the hardware.
I've also heard a number of reports that the Seria to Parallel ATA converters have limited compatibility across multiple HDD's/Motherboards.

 

[R2D2]

Good info Tar'

Just received the Asus P4S8X last week. It does utilize the Promise PDC20376 chip.
2 drives can be utilized in a Raid 0 (or Raid 1) array, with up to 6 more drives possible in standard ATA133 mode.

We'll have to see how the Serial ATA drives are when they come out, although I'm not holding my breath. Like you say, the data coming off the platters isn't enough to even tax UDMA/66, let alone the faster transfer protocols.
Intel indicates that Serial ATA will be integrated into the Springdale chipset for next year.

Can't tell you how the board runs yet (should be receiving my RAM tomorrow). It sure has some nice features though.

R2

p.s. It'll be nice when 2GIO comes out (get rid of PCI!). Talk about scalable!

 

[Tarmax]

thx R2..

oh, and a slight correction: PCI is 2GIO.. PCI Express is the 3rd generation (3GIO) (ISA was the first, of course)


And thx for the info Rand. Didn't know that WD and Seagate dropped their warranties as well. My fault though.. haven't been keepin up on the news as often as I used to

As for SerialATA, IMHO is is quite obviously NOT ready for prime time. They've been working on the issues with the loose connectors for almost a half year now, and from what we've seen at IDF the problems remains. If a system reboots because you lightly jar a connector then theirs obviously not a very good connection to the hardware.
I've also heard a number of reports that the Seria to Parallel ATA converters have limited compatibility across multiple HDD's/Motherboards.

Almost 6 months and they still haven't figured out how to make an 8mm connector stay in place when it's knocked around a bit?? Well, at least we're not talking about NASA here

But still.. it shouldn't mean that much. I mean.. who here has the tendency to occasionally kick or otherwise violently hit their PC??? ...err..

As far as the converters go.. that's at least somewhat acceptable. I mean, do you really expect technologies that differ in so much be compatible?

I don't want to start it, but.. when was the last time you saw compatible technologies?? PS2? lol.
I guess you could look at the differences between PATA and SATA as analogous to... say.. processor lines out there (the differences in P4's pin counts, or the different Athlon cores, if you want to go to an extreme), or even memory standards. Some examples for those who wish so:

PATA : SATA as 423-pin P4 : 478-pin P4 (very simplified, don't get on me cuz of the differences between the 2 P4s.. I know there's alot)
PATA : SATA as DDR : DDR-II

So close yet still so far... so sad

 

[R2D2]

3GIO!

I should proof-read my messages more. Thx Tar'


That "bad connector" bit is really inexcusable. Hope they can correct that before all the HDD's start shipping. (didn't they learn from the first gen AGP cards slipping out of their slots? Just think of all the PC's that were RMA'd then!! Whew.)

Guess I'll have to try a little Hot-Melt glue when I get my drive...

R2