Serial ATA Drive Review

[BeaverTooth]

Seagate started shipping their 80GB and 120GB Serial ATA drives on the 2nd, and over at OCWorkbench.com they have a review of the 120GB version. I really want one of these to put in my system. Here is the link:

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/seagate/sata/satap1.htm

By the way, I have heard some things about the SATA controllers, specifically that the Promise and HighPoint ones are hardware but the SiliconImage, which is used on many mobo's now, is not and in fact is a software controller chip. Is that true, and if so what kind of performance dip are we looking at?

 

[PCMarine]

SATA sure looks promising! I love the hot-plugibility w/ serial ATA. Soon laptops will have SATA connectors and we can hook up full fleged high performance desktop drives.

 

[microAmp]

Linked for the lazy like me.

 

[McCarthy]

Can already do that with firewire. Sure, gotta get an enclosure, but whatcha gonna do, leave the bare S-ATA drive sitting on the desk? So either way you're getting an enclosure.

Yeah, it will do it TOO, but seems kinda silly to get excited about an upcoming possibility that already exists. True, Firewire won't allow you to take full advantage of the cache bursts, but as far as sustained read/writes it's up to current drives.

Link to the OCWorkBench review for the lazy

Conclusion
It's a pity that we are unable to get hold of a similar IDE mode of the 120G to do the comparative tests.

Just makes all the comparisons irrelevant....

I'm just still ****ed in all this upgrade they didn't bother to put the data/power on the same cable. Routing's gonna be the same pain for power cables as ever, which has always been more of a bother for me than the data cables personally.

 

[mcveigh]

I'm just still ****ed in all this upgrade they didn't bother to put the data/power on the same cable. Routing's gonna be the same pain for power cables as ever, which has always been more of a bother for me than the data cables personally.

that's a lot of power to put through the motherboard. it would realy drive up the price for the boards. but that would be neat

 

[McCarthy]

It was supposed to be part of the spec originally. Back when I first read about S-ATA something like five years ago and thought it sounded like a good idea.

mcveigh, hmm, thing is you wouldn't be putting that much power 'through a motherboard as you wouldn't be running thick traces all over to do it. Just have a single power connector on the motherboard and run traces a short distance to the connectors. Inch or so. Just like videocards and some firewire cards do. Running from the ATX connector halfway across the board, yeah, could do it that way, but you don't have to. How much is that going to drive up the cost of a motherboard really? Any more than having to buy (or buy drives with the cost built in) power adapter cables?

Last time I mentioned this people said:
"But they can't because of crosstalk"
Go look at Firewire.

"But it'd made the cables thicker and hard to route"
Well duh, gotta route clunky power cables now, so what's the logic in that complaint? And as each cable would only be powering a single device the wires wouldn't have to be that heavy.

"But, I can't think of any reason, just don't like anyone saying anything bad about S-ATA cuz it's new"
Paraphrased, but that's the main sort of reply I got.

The 1 meter cable length of S-ATA is all but useless because of this. How many people you know have 1 meter long power cables? Make that 1.5 to account for the difference in PS placement and drive placement. So there went a big part of flexibility in case design because the S-ATA coalition got lazy. And we still get to route/tie off power cables.

 

[SexyK]

I'll just point out that it's not the "same old" power cables that have to be routed. There is a new standard power interface with S-ATA. Sure, it's not all in the same line, but it's a lot slimmer than the classic molex's we use now. I'd wait for new powersupplys to come out before passing judgement on the power cabling situation.

Kramer

 

[Adul]

i better wait on upgrading power supplies then

 

[sak]

Man i was thinking to make myself a new system next year... now i guess i will have to wait for all this integrated stuff my computer mobo does not have..what a difference 1.5 years make .

Lets see i dont have built in USB 2.0, firewire, Now SATA. I wanted to upgrade my 1ghz processor but i guess i'll just wait till late next year when MB's, Video Cards, CPU's all will be able take that new AMD 64 bit chip...hopefully AMD will get back to their winning ways.

 

[mcveigh]

I'm not an expert in this area but I think that having to design the new traces and to make sure it doesn't interfere with other board components would drive the cost up, maybe just a little but it could be significant to the end cost.

Originally posted by: McCarthy
It was supposed to be part of the spec originally. Back when I first read about S-ATA something like five years ago and thought it sounded like a good idea.

mcveigh, hmm, thing is you wouldn't be putting that much power 'through a motherboard as you wouldn't be running thick traces all over to do it. Just have a single power connector on the motherboard and run traces a short distance to the connectors. Inch or so. Just like videocards and some firewire cards do. Running from the ATX connector halfway across the board, yeah, could do it that way, but you don't have to. How much is that going to drive up the cost of a motherboard really? Any more than having to buy (or buy drives with the cost built in) power adapter cables?

Last time I mentioned this people said:
"But they can't because of crosstalk"
Go look at Firewire.

"But it'd made the cables thicker and hard to route"
Well duh, gotta route clunky power cables now, so what's the logic in that complaint? And as each cable would only be powering a single device the wires wouldn't have to be that heavy.

"But, I can't think of any reason, just don't like anyone saying anything bad about S-ATA cuz it's new"
Paraphrased, but that's the main sort of reply I got.

The 1 meter cable length of S-ATA is all but useless because of this. How many people you know have 1 meter long power cables? Make that 1.5 to account for the difference in PS placement and drive placement. So there went a big part of flexibility in case design because the S-ATA coalition got lazy. And we still get to route/tie off power cables.

 

[Derango]

Originally posted by: PCMarine
SATA sure looks promising! I love the hot-plugibility w/ serial ATA. Soon laptops will have SATA connectors and we can hook up full fleged high performance desktop drives.

Nope. Well...you could...but they probably wouldn't fit into the laptop (laptop drives are smaller), they'd suck down batteries (laptop drives use less power), and put out more here (laptop drives run a little cooler too).

So...while this might be possible, its not really practical.

 

[McCarthy]

I assumed he meant for external drives.