Serial ATA Harddrives and current motherboards

[Audax]

Hi there,

Someone just told me about Serial ATA HD and how they will (apparently) revolutionise hard drive speeds. This is significant as most HD's cannot keep up with the latest CPU speeds. The only problem is that current motherboards and soon to be released motherboards such as the KT333 boards won't be able to support Serial ATA. Is this true? I was going to purchase a KT333 from Epox (when they are released) but this has put another spanner in the works, since the motherboards that support these HD's will be released only when the HD's are released. Any info on this technology (and info on overall speed increases) and whether the above is correct (I got this info from my computer friend, who was told this by his supplier). Thanks.

Audax

 

[zzzz]

Serial ATA wont revolutionise hard drie speeds. Current mobos should support them through a controller card. If you want top performance from your hard drive buy scsi now.
serial ata

 

[shathal]

They won't revolutionise, not quite.

But they WILL be a heck of a lot cheaper than SCSI, allthewhile have some of the benefits that SCSI had over IDE - like hotswap-ability.

Current mobos will support them through controllers - we can expect to see the first controllers to be available around late Q2/Q3 this year, I'm told. Serial-ATA on motherboard should be available as of next year sometime.

It'll be a bigger rival to SCSI, as it'll not only be cheaper (high likelihood, as it'll replace IDE fairly quickly), but also be similarly fast & featureful .

 

[PullMyFinger]

Audax,
I think you'll see the same thing happen with serial ATA as happened with nearly all other flavors of ATA. In the past, whenever a higher speed ATA interface has been announced, there were many motherboards which didn't support either the new standard or drives. In order to accomodate the newer drives, interface cards became available. That's what I believe you will see in the very near future.

 

[Audax]

Thanks for the information guys. That's all I needed to know. I'll go for the Epox KT333 motherboard. here's a great review http://www.hardwarepub.com/reviews/motherboards/epoxkt333/index_6.shtml

Audax

 

[lahockey]

Serial ATA ... coming soon. (we've been hearing that for a while)
Like most of you have said (and I agree) Serial ATA capabilities will be easy with an add in card.
Serial ATA is still not featured on motherboard manufacturers road maps ...
there might be one or two that are actually PLANNING it ... but it will be a while before it is realzed ON BOARD.

EPoX KT333 board ... be careful! (not about quality ...)
EPoX has been saying that they are taking a "wait and see" approach to this chipset.
As you all know Via get's chipsets right on the second try!
EPoX is also having thoughts about switching the IDE RAID chip on the board for the "A" revision

Some very popular review sites (this one?) aren't too impressed with KT333 performance ...
KT400 has been mentioned ... and AMD just threw out all kinds of info for their Hammer/Claw Hammer CPU's and
chipsets to support them ... but that is at least two (2) quarters away ... right???

 

[Jeff7]

Only revolution in storage in terms of speed will probably be affordable solid state storage. I had seen something awhile ago about using a laser to create the tiny magnetic fields instead of using wire, but I haven't seen anything since. That was supposed to greatly increase the amount of data per square inch. In terms of transfer speed, it's limited by the way hard drives work. The faster they spin, the more suceptible they are to impact-caused damage; same thing applies to the heads.
A possible increase could come if the manufacturers figured a way of putting multiple independent heads in a single drive. Otherwise, I really can't think of any good ways of increasing HD transfer speeds.

 

[lahockey]

Don't forget ...
you can ALWAYS wait for new technology.
If I was to wait ... I would PASS Serial ATA and go straight to OPTICAL hard drives, Biologic Hard Drives,
or Static Hard Drives (large memory cache devices - NO MOVING PARTS)
No roadmaps ... from Intel, AMD, Via, SIS or ALi include Serial ATA as a REAL product
Not yet at least

 

[dolph]

from an article found here, Intel, IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum, Dell, and more are working on serial ata, so it looks like it's going to be the next step.

 

[greg]

>>from an article found here, Intel, IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum, Dell, and more are working on serial ata, so it looks like it's going to be the next step.



riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight, an article from more than 2 years ago.